Water-Energy-Food Nexus and Eco-Sustainability: A Three-Stage Dual-Boundary Network DEA Model for Evaluating Jiangsu Province in China

Authors

Jianxuan Li¹, Sijing Liu², Yizhao Zhao², Zaiwu Gong^{2, *,} , Guo Wei^3, , Lihong Wang²

¹Business School, Hohai University, Nanjing, 211100, P. R. China

²School of Management Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology Nanjing, 210044, P. R. China

³Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Pembroke, Pembroke, NC, 28372, USA

^*Corresponding author. Email: zwgong26@163.com

DOI

10.2991/ijcis.d.210423.005How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Water–energy–food nexus; Eco-sustainability; Coupling effect; Efficiency assessment; Network DEA (NDEA)

Abstract

The water–energy–food (W-E-F) nexus approach has become the basis for a host of many methods addressing the security of global resources, whose methods are often nonparametric, due to the complex and indefinable relationship among the three. In this work, the nonparametric evaluation method data envelopment analysis (DEA) is further extended to a three-stage dual-boundary network model (TD-NDEA) for dealing with the “black box” problem in W-E-F Nexus. In the empirical study, the TD-NDEA method is applied to assess the efficiencies of W-E-F nexus in 13 selected cities of Jiangsu Province in China, where W-E-F nexus is innovatively decomposed into three stages, “W-E,” “WE-F,” and “WEF.” External factors such as labor force, urbanization, and economy are included in the assessment. On this basis, environmental governance and policy interventions are utilized as indicators of eco-sustainability to reshape the third stage as “WEF-Eco.” It is perceived from the numeric analysis that (i) regional disparities in the efficiencies of W-E-F nexus expand significantly; (ii) compared with the labor force, urbanization, and economy are more remarkable toward influencing the efficiencies; and (iii) ecological sustainable planning plays an effective role in reducing regional heterogeneity and speeding up the process of regional coordination. Based upon the findings, relevant policy recommendations are carefully designed.

Copyright

© 2021 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press B.V.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - JOUR
AU  - Jianxuan Li
AU  - Sijing Liu
AU  - Yizhao Zhao
AU  - Zaiwu Gong
AU  - Guo Wei
AU  - Lihong Wang
PY  - 2021
DA  - 2021/05/05
TI  - Water-Energy-Food Nexus and Eco-Sustainability: A Three-Stage Dual-Boundary Network DEA Model for Evaluating Jiangsu Province in China
JO  - International Journal of Computational Intelligence Systems
SP  - 1501
EP  - 1515
VL  - 14
IS  - 1
SN  - 1875-6883
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/ijcis.d.210423.005
DO  - 10.2991/ijcis.d.210423.005
ID  - Li2021
ER  -