Towards the Deployment of Food, Energy and Water Security Early Warning Systems as Convergent Technologies for Building Climate Resilience

The goal of designing convergent technologies, such as food, energy, water, energy security early warning systems (Nexus-EWS), is driven by societal need to adapt to increasing frequency and intensity of extreme hydro-meteorological events (e.g., floods, droughts, heatwaves) differentially distributed across the planet due to accelerating global climate change. Deployment and continual improvement of such convergent technologies may enhance social understanding of coupled food-energy-water systemic interactions, couplings, and processes, which in turn are critically needed for forecasting and managing the social ecological risk accentuated by climate change-induced extreme hydro-meteorological events. This chapter presents a brief review and discussion of Nexus-EWS as convergent technologies and provides promising examples of Nexus-EWS applications with specific focus on Central and South Asian countries, both within countries and across regional scale entities. The scientific and technical challenges for deploying, sustaining, and improving Nexus-EWS to generate accurate early warnings about the risks to secure and safe provision of food, energy, and water and identify early action capabilities are also explored. The growing role of open-sourced big data, such as remotely sensed satellite data and artificial intelligence, and their intersection with traditional security dimensions are discussed. Geopolitical and ethical issues arising from the deployment of convergent technologies such as Nexus-EWS are presented to inform the future research and policy action needs and goals.