Track: Environmental Engineering

Abstract

The world environment is continuously changing due to various factors that include technological advancements, climate change, economic growth, and population increases. These factors contribute to greater demand for food, energy, and water resources. Policymakers need to strategize and plan accordingly to determine how to preserve the environment due to rising temperatures, water sacristy and increased demand for food resources while also efficiently managing these resources in order to meet sustainable goals. Policymakers are tasked with reducing carbon emissions, as well as increasing resource utilization efficiently all while keeping costs down. An approach known as food-energy-water (FEW) nexus is developed in order to promote sustainable development and synergy between resources in the nexus. The adoption of this FEW nexus framework can contribute to a greater understanding between the resources and their connections and thus allow us the evaluation of tradeoffs that exist between the resources and optimize the framework where informed decisions that will aid in achieving sustainability goals (societal, economic, and environmental can be achieved. In this paper, we apply and study the impact of the FEW on a case study in Florida that includes a number of urban farms. The urban farms were developed with the objective of contributing fresh food supply to the local community. The inhabitants of the local community belong to food deserts, where inhabitants are low-income, low-mobility, and do not have access to fresh food within ten miles. Each of the urban farms belongs to a community-scale microgrid (MG) which provides electricity for the local community and the electricity is generated from solar energy. The MG’s objective is to meet environmental sustainability goals by contributing fewer carbon emissions compared to traditional energy sources such as coal, crude oil, or natural gas. In addition, solar energy is a viable option due to the amount of solar radiation in the state of Florida. In this paper, the impacts of the proposed framework (urban farms & microgrids) through an analysis of societal, economic, and environmental sustainability measures are investigated. For societal sustainability measurements, the impact of the framework on food security of the local inhabitants are studied. For environmental sustainability, the impact of carbon emissions and the carbon emissions that are avoided due to the use of solar energy are analyzed. Finally, in terms of economic sustainability, the costs of the solar energy infrastructure, as well as possible costs or profits due to lack of electricity production or excess production are estimated. The paper employs an agent-based modeling (ABM) approach to study the interactions between agents in the framework (consumers, urban farms, microgrids) and this will allow to gain a greater understanding of the synergies and tradeoffs that occur in a FEW nexus for the case study considered.