The energy-water-land nexus represents a critical leverage future policies must draw upon to reduce trade-offs between sustainable development objectives. Yet, existing long-term planning tools do not provide the scope or level of integration across the nexus to unravel important development constraints. Moreover, existing tools and data are not always made openly available or are implemented across disparate modeling platforms that can be difficult to link directly with modern scientific computing tools and databases. In this paper, we present the NExus Solutions Tool (NEST): a new open modeling platform that integrates multi-scale energy-water-land resource optimization with distributed hydrological modeling. The new approach provides insights into the vulnerability of water, energy and land resources to future socioeconomic and climatic change and how multi-sectoral policies, technological solutions and investments can improve the resilience and sustainability of transformation pathways while avoiding counterproductive interactions among sectors. NEST can be applied at different spatial and temporal resolutions, and is designed specifically to tap into the growing body of open-access geospatial data available through national inventories and the Earth system modeling community. A case study analysis of the Indus River basin in south Asia demonstrates the capability of the model to capture important interlinkages across system transformation pathways towards the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals, including the intersections between local and regional transboundary policies and incremental investment costs from rapidly increasing regional consumption projected over the coming decades. ... Read more

Predictions show that pressure on already limited water and energy resources is expected to increase in many parts of the world as a result of growing populations, rapid urbanization, increasing pollution and climate change impacts. With water and energy playing a critical role in socio-economic development, ensuring resource security is a top policy concern. However, achieving this efficiently requires taking into account the various links between the two sectors through their joint management. Feedback between the water and energy sectors exists across system life-cycles and links the resources both spatially and temporally. Tracking the impacts of policies made in one sector on the other can thus be complicated and several 'nexus' methodologies have been developed to try and address these issues. However, the different physical, temporal and spatial characteristics of the water and energy systems present several hurdles in analyzing the two resources simultaneously. This paper overcomes many of these problems with a new, fully coupled water-energy optimization model. Based on a review of contemporary literature, the model develops an original methodology to hard-link the two systems in detail across spatial and temporal scales, as well as between individual system processes throughout the life-cycle of each resource. In addition, the model also tracks changes in water quality through each process, allowing for detailed accounting of the energy needs for water treatment. The methodology proposed in this paper can be used to investigate various cross-sectoral issues and policies such as: water availability and temperature impacts on power plant cooling; emission constraint and biofuel expansion planning impacts on water resources; and the implications of water infrastructure expansion on the energy system. The capabilities of the coupled model are investigated in an example case study for Spain. An integrated approach is shown to have several benefits including lower total costs, better resource efficiency and improved robustness for a wide range of variations in several uncertain parameters. Coupled water-energy planning thus provides a critical opportunity to improve resource security and prevent inefficient decisions which could exacerbate problems even further. ... Read more