A Framework to Address the Food, Energy and Water Nexus among Indian Megacities and their Rapidly Expanding Peripheries

Abstract

India is growing fast, with its fast-expanding cities that are rapidly growing into megacities. This not only puts tremendous pressure on the existing resources of these cities but also poses a grand challenge to the urban planner on how to decongest the flow of resources to the continuously growing population. A major part of this challenge comes from the food, energy and water (FEW) nexus, which in part can be addressed by developing the peri-urban areas to provide the means of such resources. In this article, we have explained a generalized framework to develop the tools for sustainable resource management in the peri-urban areas of the Indian megacities and discussed the tripartite approach to implement it. The first part of the approach is to develop smart environmental surveillance, which will provide the first snapshot of environmental parameters in the region. The second part is to integrate the large datasets with the regional ecosystem characteristics to understand the interactions between the living organisms and the environment. Last in the approach is to extract simplified knowledge from the interactions about the ecosystem and translate them into activities. The outcome of this approach is a peri-urban ecosystem, which will be able to cater to the sustainable means of food and energy in return for the used/ storm water from the cities. Such a framework can be extended to megacities in other developing countries and implemented to first understand the peri-urban ecosystem and then to implement the management tools.