Food, energy and water (FEW) systems are inextricably linked with high degrees of interdependence and interconnectedness. The overall goal of this project is to develop a systems-level modeling and optimization framework to understand the sustainability, resilience, and structure of the FEW nexus with a focus on the U.S. national food system. The project is targeted to provide an understanding of the resilience of the U.S. domestic food flow network in conjunction with embodied water and energy flows, leading in turn to insight into the ecology, behavior, sustainability, and resilience of the FEW nexus.
The project focuses on three main research objectives. The first objective examines the U.S. national food system with an emphasis on inter-state food trade. Specifically, the project will model the embodied water and energy associated with traded food by combining, integrating, and reconciling publically available data sets on domestic food production, trade, and life cycle environmental impacts. The second objective will focus on developing and applying existing and novel network theory based techniques and metrics to understand the overall topology, sustainable, and resilience of the U.S. FEW networks. The third objective will develop and apply optimization-based approaches for sustainable and resilient design of FEW systems. Specifically, it will permit the integration of information from network science and optimization techniques for identifying and evaluating interventions for enhancing the sustainability and resilience of the FEW nexus. By combining data on domestic food trade, embodied water and energy flows with network theory and optimization-based tools and techniques, the project seeks to discover novel sustainability and resilience insights, and opportunities for the highly integrated FEW systems. Interdependencies, interconnectedness, and vulnerable points of the FEW nexus will be identified, which will support planning for the sustainable management of these integrated systems. The research aims to result in two significant contributions towards understanding and supporting the sustainability and resilience of the FEW nexus. First, an understanding of the structure of the FEW nexus is to be developed, describing its interconnectedness, interdependencies, and vulnerable points. Second, rigorous optimization-based approaches for optimizing the structure of the domestic food trade network will be developed, with a view towards enhancing its sustainability and resilience. The research aims to play a pivotal role in satisfying the need for understanding sustainability and resilience of the FEW nexus via integration of network theory techniques with rigorous optimization-based approaches and life cycle oriented methods.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
