New report - Co-optimizing Solutions: Water and Energy for Food, Feed and Fiber

One of the biggest challenges we will face in the coming years is how to provide more food, fiber and fuel to a growing and increasingly more affluent world, while at the same time striving to use resources more efficiently, mitigate and adapt to climate change, and maintain healthy ecosystems. Competing and growing demands for water, energy and food will put great strains on our resources and require us to leave business-as-usual scenarios behind.

The "World Business Council for Sustainable Development" (WBCSD) has published a new report “Co-optimizing Solutions: Water and Energy for Food, Feed and Fiber”, which presents some of the most promising, innovative and scalable solutions to the world’s interconnected water, energy, and food, feed, and fiber challenges, and reveals how these solutions can be integrated to become even more impactful. It is now available on our website, together with an executive summary.

The report is based on advanced research with a sophisticated quantitative analysis of global linkages compiled by MetaMeta and Resourcematics Ltd, and case studies of techniques that forward-thinking companies are using. These new and upcoming techniques may hold the key to ushering us towards agricultural production that is knowledge-intensive, more precise resource-efficient.

The report was launched at the “Sustainability in the Water-Energy-Food Nexus Conference” which took place on May 19-20 in Bonn, Germany.

Among WBCSD’s strategic priorities are reducing shared water risks, increasing water efficiency across key points of the agricultural value chain, restoring productivity to degraded land, reducing food loss and waste from field to fork, and building resilience to climate change, all issues linked to the co-optimized solutions detailed in this publication. In the last few years, the WBCSD has been developing several activities around the climate, water, energy nexus, and published:

  • Water, Energy and Climate - a contribution from the business community report in March 2009
  • Building a Resilient Power Sector in April 2014