Welcome back to the introductory lesson on the Nexus. In the last session we were looking at examples of analyses of how it is possible to do analyses of the Nexus, which is different from the standard applications of reduction in science. So, this imply that we were using a case study to show you that it's possible to organize numbers across different levels of analysis dimension using analysis in space and analyzing how open is the system. The case study is dealing with the specific problem. And then this has been developed in a project sponsored by FAO. You could have here, in this website, a more detailed explanation of three different case studies but not just Mauritius. The type of analysis that I will present now is organized in two way. One, is the diagnostic analysis. You're characterizing the metabolic pattern of the system. So, where energy, food, and water is used to do what. And then you could have simulations, that is, what happens if I'm trying to change the policy, the status quo. A disclaimer, a warning, do not get scare by the amount of information that I will throw at you in the next minutes. I'm showing this to give you an overview: How does it work? What type of information? What you can do with this type of analysis. Of course, I'm not expecting that you can understand everything how does it work. This will be the eight weeks of the course, you can get one by one the pieces of the puzzle how to do it. So, here is simply to have we do have the big picture of what is different in what we are trying to say. So back to the problem. The problem of which we were asked to apply the methodology was that, in Mauritius they were using 90% of the land in sugarcane production because the European Union were offering good price for this commodity. While at a certain point, the European Commission decides to discontinue this policy. What to do now with 90% of land? So, the approach was this way, first of all, you are characterizing what type of variables that you are using and how these variables are integrated to provide a meaningful picture. This is what we call developing a grammar. A grammar is an expected set of relations over elements defined in semantic terms. The grammar is the same logic like the grammar that you have in a language. You have different words in the language, but in order to be able to use the word to say something meaningful you have to organize the word in different categories: This is subject, this is the verb, this is adjective. And then you can put different words and different verbs into the different categories, but still the semantic definition of what is a verb, what is a subject remain even if the subject is a bottle, or is a dog or is a car. This is an example of grammar of food and is multi-level in the sense that is referring to different activity or different elements characteristic of the system that can be observed only at different levels. So, you have the production of food, that is how much food is produced locally. Then you will have imported food, this is the amount of food coming from outside the island. What type of food we're talking about. Again, these are semantic characterization. Later on you will have to decide formal categories to put here: Vegetable, grain, animal products, milk. All things within the category types of food. Then you will have final consumption. Again, in final consumption you will already see urban, rural, tourist. Then you will have food invested in food production. One part of food is eaten by the agricultural sector itself. Let's imagine feeds for animals, eggs to making chickens and so on. Then, of course you have losses. This is a way of having a logical structure of your data. The second problem is to have the characterization, what we call the end use matrix. Who is using the flows and funds used by a society to do what? An end use matrix is a data array describing how the metabolic elements are located across functional elements of the society. Since this is a little bit complicated, let's add an example. So basically, you have here the whole society is on this line and this whole society is using food, energy, and water: 8_PJ of food, 56_PJ of energy, 1700_hm3 extracted from the ecosystem. And fund element, this is a human activity that will be the hours of labor here. Power capacity will be the technical capital, and land in terms of hectares of land. There are functional elements of the society. The whole society's functional level is how at least it can reproduce itself. Below the whole society you have internal organs: The household, paid work. They are capable of expressing functions. This is agriculture is producing energy, is generating the energy carrier and so on. This is the functional elements and each functional element is using a share of the food energy, water, human activity, technical capital, and land. If you're using a very small share you begin negligible at this level of analyses. At the lower level of analyses we can still look at the use of technical capital per hectare, for instance. Here you have what is in economy called production factor; Labour, capital, and land. Here you have the flows: food, energy, and water. And then on this upper part you have how the society is using these metabolic element. In the lower part, you have that degree of openness of the society, that is how these flows are consumed and even from where these flows are coming. A part of these flows, 1.3 of these 8, are produced domestically of food and 6.7 is imported. Let's put together the two things. Here 5.9 is the amount of food consumed by the tourists. Then you have the imports and supply are the food produced domestically. 6.7 are imported and 1.3 domestically produced. These are the losses. These are the amount of food consumed by agriculture. We could visualize this in a different way. Again, this number is there, this number is there. The losses are located in the amount of food in the paid work sector. Then you will have the imports here and the domestic supply here. Next step is to look for external constraints. For instance, how water is used in Mauritius? How is the internal use of water comparable with the external supply of water from the ecosystem? Again, you can use a water grammar, this is from where the water is coming. What type of water you are appropriating; surface water, ground water, solid water. What type of water use we are talking about; Green water, is the water the plants are using through the soil but the humans cannot handle. Blue water is the water the humans are handling directly. What is important that these parts, the human part, can be better specified in terms of end use matrix. Again, you have, for the whole compartment, the household urban, household rural, paid work, paid work service in government. You have all the different sub-sector of the sector. How much is extracted, what is blue, what type of end use you have. What is important then you can map this type of consumption, who is using the water from the source of the water. These are the aquifer from which the water is extracted. Why is important to do that because for instance, at the global level, Mauritius and they are using much less water than is available: 1700 versus 3900. But if you are looking in GIS in the different end use by aquifer, then you could have a couple of aquifer in which the situation is not particularly good. For instance, around the capital they are already overdrafting 158% of what what will be possible to extract. After having a good idea of who is using what then you can get into the simulation. We are just giving a couple of example here. The first things, what would happen if we are allocating all the flow fund we are using now to make sugarcane to make biofuels? This will be the end use matrix, and this is the vector of water and human activity and land that is allocated in what we call exports. It will be sugarcane. This sugarcane is using 90% of the water and 90% of the land and basically producing only 4% of the Gross Value Added. Basically, only four people with a lot of land so it's not particularly good for the development of the country. Let's imagine that this goes in energy and mining and readjust the different allocation of water value added human activity because of this [inaudible]. If you do that you discover that this is not a particularly exciting solution in the sense you're still using 90% of water and you are not producing much of the energy. Much more interesting will be to try to produce more food, as you see that 6.7 out of 8 are imported. But we could try to do a simulation to whether or not we could produce food. To do that, first of all, we have to check whether or not we have enough land or enough water to produce food. Then you can start with where you are producing sugarcane at the moment and what type of soil, what type of slope. And then you add to these the type of food that you would like to produce. Then you can locate a production of food that is matching what you are requiring. You have to select the crops and then look why do you want to do the crops. Having this information you can check whether or not you have enough food, for instance. Then, if you have enough water you are looking at how much water is used now while cultivating sugarcane, and then what would happen if you would cultivate food. And is fantastic. It's very good in the sense we are using less water than we are using now, so water will not be a problem. Let's do the simulation in the end use matrix. What happened? There is a problem here. There is a problem that is not due to external constraints: We will have land, we will have water. What we will not have, we will not have labor. Why is that? Because in a island like Mauritius, a lot of labor is allocated in tourist, and there is a lot of growing activity in the financial market so nobody wants to be farmers as everyone in the world. So, basically in this case you have a constraint that is not related to the availability of energy or water, it's simply due to the fact that the type of work requirements for producing food will not be compatible with actual profile of human activity. So, we can conclude. This first overview, how does it work, this analyses of the nexus. Don't worry if you couldn't understand the details of the calculation, the idea is just to show you how this works. What is important to take away from this class is that if you want to understand, try to have a better insight about policy relevant sustainability issue. You have to analyze the relation between water, energy and food across different compartments, at different levels, scales and then using GIS. There are no simple solutions. Every time you change something, you change all the rest. And then you cannot do this type of analysis unless you're capable of scaling and georeferencing what you're trying to do in your sociological systems.
