The Risk of Water, Energy, and Food Nexus under Regional Metabolism for Multi-Sector City

Abstract

The Urban Nexus system creates another risk characteristic of resource metabolism. Urban metabolism has complex effects from multi-levels and multi-sectors resulted from the changes socio-economic. It is crucial to implement effective urban governance; in particular, resource metabolism creates a new nexus risk by dramatic growth in urban areas. The resource metabolism associates with water, energy, and food consumption on an urban scale that drives the intensity in resource metabolism. Therefore, this study estimates the FEW intensity of the nexus and demand side in material flow analysis by organizing into four categories of resource metabolism, including supply side, process side, demand side, and final sink. This research compares different characteristics for a small island dominated by tourism and a multi-sector city dominated by increasing economic activity. The resource intensity on the demand side and resource service systems are evaluated to identify the nexus intensity and risk for FEW nexus at the urban scale. This study determines that constraints for resource service systems are complex, and suggests that resource consumption intensity is higher in that particular nexus and demand sector. To avoid excessive loads on resource metabolism, sustainable resource management should implement trade-off strategies after analyzing the resource metabolism for urban nexus.