PhD ceremony K. (Karabee) Das: Nexus in the rural system

Water, energy and food are essential for human life. These resources are interlinked: water is needed to produce food and energy is needed for water supply etc. This inter-linkage is called the water-energy-food nexus. About 3 billion people are living in the rural areas of the developing world.  They are heavily dependent on the resources that their surroundings supply them. Energy is obtained from wood, water from wells, and food is from own grown crops and in place of machines most of the work is done by humans itself. This thesis studies the energy-water-food nexus in these rural communities. An average rural person requires 3500 m² of land and about 2400 m³ of water per year. The largest share of the land and water (70%) was needed for growing trees used, as firewood for cooking, 30 % was needed for food production.

Next to this also human labour needed to produce the cooking fuel was quantified. Again it was shown that a large share of the labour available was needed for producing the energy for cooking, indicating that fuelwood is a very resource intensive energy source (it requires a lot of land, water and human labour).  This means that reductions in the amount of cooking fuel needed, for instance by using improved cookstoves or even a change to non wood cooking fuels like kerosene, will help to reduce the pressure on the limited resource as land and water in these rural areas.

Dissertation: http://hdl.handle.net/(...)08-ae1c-aff339f769b8