2024 Reports

Leveraging the Water-Energy-Food (WEF) Nexus: Climate Change Mitigation and

Gondhalekar, Daphne

Located in the Indian Himalayas, Leh is a small city of around 60,000 inhabitants facing serious issues related to water management due to rapid economic growth. The Nexus Research Lab at the Technical University of Munich (Nexus@TUM) chose Leh as a case study as its resource scarcity, due to its semi-arid high-altitude location with extremely cold winters, has very serious implications for water, energy and food security for the local population in the longer term. The research was funded from 2011 to 2018 by the European Commission, the German Research Foundation, and the Bavarian State Ministry of Environment and Consumer Protection. A collaboration was initiated in 2012 with the local government and a local environmental NGO. Since then, regular stakeholder workshops and consultations have been held in Leh, involving local NGO, government, academia and civil society representatives, and spiritual leaders. This then sustains a dialogue on applying the WEF Nexus approach to develop decentralized urban water infrastructure to facilitate resource recovery using socio-economic surveys and geographic information systems (GIS) spatial and quantitative environmental engineering-based analyses, as an alternative to the planned centralized sewerage system, as part of a climate change resilience strategy.