ABSTRACT
Water availability, along with land and food availability and other mineral resources, is an increasingly popular topic, a growing preoccupation as the world population continues to increase. This is not so much a global problem (de Marsily 2009) as it is a regional problem of availability to satisfy our needs for improving human health, food security, biodiverse natural ecosystems and effective energy production. Indeed, there are multiple feedback effects, interconnections, and couplings among these four main domains dependent on water resources. This relationship has been described as the “water—energy—food nexus” (Scanlon et al. 2017, Cai et al. 2018). The emergence of ‘nexus thinking’ comes from an increasingly perceptible understanding that natural resources may someday limit the development of our well-being and of our growing human communities. Consequently, win-win strategies must be developed for preserving environmental sustainability together with producing efficiency gains to balance the imposed growth from the demographic issue (Ringler et al. 2013). This problem is particularly true for freshwater (i.e., natural continental water with a limited ion content from brackish water and seawater) that is indeed essential for each of us.
