Resource nexus for sustainable development: Status quoand prospect

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) proposed by the United Nations Sustainable Development Summit in 2015 are a roadmap for action to promote coordinated development of economy, society, and the environment. Natural resources, including energy, water, biomass, minerals, and land, are key elements for the achievement of SDGs. Various dependence, substitution, competition, and complementation relationships exist among different kinds of natural resources. The idea of intrinsic interconnectivities of the world’s material basis, which states that the five basic elements of “gold, wood, water, fire, and earth” mutually enable and restrict one other, can be traced back to Wuxing theory in ancient Chinese culture. The research interest in understanding and managing such interconnections has inspired a large number of studies on “resource nexus” and its role in facilitating SDGs in the past decade. Bibliometric analysis showed that the number of publications on resource nexus increased rapidly after the Bonn 2011 Nexus Conference. Nexuses between water and other resources, especially energy, are commonly investigated issues. Transdisciplinary approaches have become an important research direction in recent years. Studies on resource nexus have been incorporated into SDG discussions after 2015. Methods and models used in resource nexus studies are generally classified into three categories, namely, accounting, simulation, and optimization. These widely used methods in the system analysis of single-resource elements have been extended to cover and focus on linkages among resources. A number of integrated decision support tools, such as CLEW, WEF Nexus Tool, WEAP-LEAP, and WEF Nexus Rapid Appraisal Tool, have also been developed for problem identification, scenario analysis, and policy design. Many research institutes and international organizations have compiled databases on resource extraction, production, consumption, and trade to facilitate academic studies and decision making. Effects of resource nexus on sustainable development can be summarized as follows: (1) Strengthened impacts of increasingly interconnected resource nexus on sustainable development, (2) global expansion of localized resource nexus, (3) resource nexus leads to both synergies and conflicts among SDGs, and (4) resource nexus has both promoting and restricting effects on sustainable socioeconomic transitions. Finally, future investigations can focus on the following directions: (1) Expand the research scope of resource nexus; (2) reveal mechanisms and influences of resource nexus; (3) build universal, open-source, and extendible data platforms; and (4) strengthen the decision support capability of resource nexus studies.