Co-creating a Water, Energy, Food and Ecosystem (WEFE) transition in irrigated agriculture systems within the Spanish Duero River Basin .

Water, energy, and food security are essential for human health and  development. However the increasing demand for natural resources, has surpassed the capacity of multiple ecosystems and is compromising their sustainability and resilience. The management of these resources is interconnected, and cannot be managed independently, since water and energy are essential for food production. Also their management is crucial for the maintenance of ecosystems, so the WEFE NEXUS emerges as a resource management strategy.In the Spanish demarcation of the Duero River basin, water scarcity and water stress have become a concern (especially in the main water consumer: irrigated agriculture), which, together with the increase in energy prices, have affected food production and degraded ecosystems. All these WEFE challenges have been traditionally carried out independently, contrary to the international community recommendation of treating them together as WEFE Nexus in order to address their interrelationships and achieve a balance. To promote and co-define WEFE-Nexus transition actions to improve local WEFE-Nexus conditions, four workshops with stakeholders have been performed. The first one aimed to bring together various stakeholders from different institutions or organizations working in the different WEFE NEXUS entities, to concretize a diverse work group and present the WEFE NEXUS methodology through the RRI, applying the RRI Roadmap ©TM, and begin to identify the main challenges from a WEFE NEXUS perspective. The second workshop presented the concrete vision of WEFE NEXUS, the concepts and vision of an expert on the topic, as well as his experiences and points of view. Based on this information and the challenges identified in the first workshop, the serious game methodology was used to analyse in a positive, negative and alternative way possible measures and actions to be to address the challenges. Identifying the advantages and limitations of these actions. The third workshop presented the “as it is” scenario with real relevant data, to set numbers to the challenges identified by the stakeholders themselves. Based on this, a codefined vision of the objective scenario “as it should be” was developed, proposing the priority measures and actions on which the NEL should focus. Co-creating a WEFE NEXUS transition plan in the fourth workshop.The co-created WEFE NEXUS plan aims at achieving a resilient irrigated agriculture in the Spanish Douro Basin, maintaining the gross income of farmers under the potential future scenarios of water stress, energy increase and agricultural inputs’ cost. It focuses on optimizing the use of resources (water, energy, and fertilizers) for food production while preserving the NEL's natural and productive ecosystems. This plan has four measures: 1) Improve fertilizer use efficiency, 2) Increase energy efficiency, 3) Optimize water use efficiency and 4) Reduce energy dependence. Likewise, it includes eight concrete and complementary actions, which are evaluated with 10 indicators.