Varying Interactions Among the Water, Energy and Food Nexus Across East and Southeast Asia

The concept of the water, energy, and food (WEF) security nexus envisions the holistic development of WEF sectors, considering social, economic, and environmental aspects. Ensuring WEF security is challenging due to positive and negative interactions among the sectors. The nexus approach provides a framework to identify these interactions and to address this challenge. Despite its usefulness, however, only a limited number of nexus studies have discussed the quantitative interactions among the nexus elements. Furthermore, the varying nexus relationships across different countries have rarely been analysed and compared. To fill this gap, we systematically analysed WEF interactions for East and Southeast Asia by using open data sources at the country scale. We defined positive and negative correlations between the WEF security indicators as synergies and trade-offs, respectively. We identified the most positively and negatively influential indicators in the WEF networks using the results of our correlation analysis. Our results show that more trade-off relations than synergistic relations exist within and among the WEF sectors for East and Southeast Asia at the regional scale, e.g., interactions between energy-energy, energy-water, food-water, and water-water. The country-level analysis reveals that the percentages of synergies and trade-offs vary across countries. Some countries (e.g., China, Mongolia, and Myanmar) have more links in the synergy network. In contrast, others (e.g., Malaysia, the Republic of Korea, and Vietnam) have more links in the trade-off network. Our analysis highlights the strategies for promoting renewable and clean energy and discouraging fossil fuel consumption will leverage the WEF security nexus at both regional and country scales in the East and Southeast Asian regions.