Application and evaluation of water, food and energy nexus approach in agricultural water resource management (Case study: Borkhar plain - Isfahan)

The approach of water, energy and food correlation can be defined as an approach to evaluate the development and implementation of policies that emphasize the security of these things at the same time. The purpose of this research is to provide a method to analyze the relationship between water, food and energy in the crop production chain. Based on the proposed method and according to the amount of water and energy consumption, four indicators of water and energy consumption and water and energy productivity, and also based on these indicators, a combined index of water, food and energy nexus is proposed. This research has conducted on the Borkhor plain of Isfahan province and the MODFLOW model has used to simulate the watershed quantitatively and since the objective functions in this study are linear, multi-objective linear programming was chosen to solve the optimization problem. The goal of solving the optimization problem is 4 scenarios of water consumption minimization, energy consumption minimization, profit maximization, as well as water, food and energy maximization scenario. The results show that although each of the scenarios alone reflect the positive effects of reducing water and electricity consumption, but by using the scenario of combining water, food and energy, in addition to reducing water and electricity consumption, farmers' profits have also increased significantly, so that the amount of water consumption before optimization was 50 million cubic meters per year, but after optimization and applying the scenario of maximizing the correlation of water, food and energy, it decreased by 8% and reached 46 million cubic meters per year, and the amount of consumption Energy decreased by 9.7% from 13150330 kilowatt hours per year to 11867563 kilowatt hours per year and in addition, the profitability of the products before optimization was 6301966 million Rials, which after applying the scenario of correlation of water, food and energy with 21 The percentage of increase reached 8015264 million rials and on the other hand, with the continuation of the optimal scenario, the level of underground water in the state of maximizing the correlation of water, food and energy will decrease by 0.478 meters less than the existing conditions and and on the other hand, by continuing this trend in the long term, we will see a significant impact on the level of underground water.