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On the Sustainability of Providing Water, Energy, and Food
Citation:
Cabezas, H. On the Sustainability of Providing Water, Energy, and Food. Sixth International Conference on Water, Energy and Environment, Sharjah, Shajah, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES, March 26 - 28, 2019.
Impact/Purpose:
The purpose of the presentation is to provide an over view of sustainability with a focus on food, water and energy, and to illustrate the kinds of actions that the engineering profession could take to address some of the challenges. The audience is mostly technical and scientific consisting of university level students and practicing professionals.
Description:
The World is steadily moving into a major challenge. The challenge is how to provide for the growing and developing human population within the limits of one planet, the Earth, over the long term. The effort is known as sustainability. To explore this challenge, I will focus on the three closely linked issues of providing water, energy, and food. In addition, there is the issue of maintaining order and stability as necessary conditions for any kind of acceptable human existence. These issues, unfortunately, present critical but not well-bounded problems, and for that reason there are many more questions than answers. However, to explore the issues and their bounds, I will discuss what is known including some planetary limits and limits imposed by the known laws of Nature. This will include consideration of what exactly constitutes a sustainable system for water, energy, and food. While many considerations are possible, these can be condensed to about six requirements roughly representing human well-being, burden on land, energy resource use, efficiency of energy use, economic value productivity, and system stability. The application of these requirements to real systems will be discussed. The lecture will conclude with some thoughts on approaches stand a chance of adoption under current and foreseeable future conditions.