Viele Länder des globalen Südens erleben aktuell die doppelte Dynamik von rasanter Urbanisierung und globaler Umweltveränderung. Die Schaffung nachhaltiger und widerstandsfähiger Städte ist ein globales Ziel der UN (SDG11). Die Urbanisierung wird mit zahlreichen Vorteilen auf gesellschaftlicher und individueller Ebene in Verbindung gebracht. Gleichzeitig birgt sie jedoch negative Auswirkungen auf die natürlichen Ressourcen, kann städtische Versorgungssysteme überfordern und neue Verwundbarkeiten schaffen. Da die verschiedenen Herausforderungen miteinander verknüpft sind, bedarf es eines interdisziplinären Forschungsansatzes. Im Laufe des letzten Jahrzehnts hat sich der Food-Water-Energy (FWE)-Nexus für sektorübergreifende Analysen etabliert. In dieser Dissertation wird ein Beitrag zum Verständnis des FWE-Nexus in schnell urbanisierenden Regionen des globalen Südens geleistet und es werden Defizite in der aktuellen Debatte adressiert. Im Mittelpunkt der Arbeit steht die Millionenstadt Pune in Indien. Um ein umfassendes Systemverständnis zu erlangen, wird in Zusammenarbeit mit lokalen Stakeholdern zunächst eine Sammlung von 22 FWE-Herausforderungen auf verschiedenen Ebenen erstellt. In den anschließenden vertieften Analysen werden ausgewählte urbanisierungsbezogene Herausforderungen untersucht, insbesondere die zukünftige Entwicklung des Stadtwachstums und die Zuwanderung nach Pune. Letztere ist einer der wichtigsten Wachstumstreiber. Zu diesem Zweck wird ein neuartiger Modellierungsansatz vorgestellt, bei dem nationale sozioökonomische Szenarien auf die Stadtebene herunterskaliert, und in räumlich explizite Darstellungen von bebauter Fläche und Bevölkerungsdichte übersetzt werden. Diese erlauben Analysen potenzieller FWE-Nexus-Herausforderungen in Zukunft. Die Untersuchung der Zuwanderung nach Pune basiert auf qualitativen und quantitativen Datenquellen mittels Mixed-Methods-Verfahren. Das in allen Szenarien erwartete signifikante Stadtwachstum ist mit einer Konzentration des Ressourcenbedarfs in der Stadt, einem erheblichen Verlust an fruchtbarem Land und einer Zunahme von Überschwemmungsrisiken verbunden. In Bezug auf Zuwanderung nach Pune spielt der Klimawandel in Form von Dürren eine signifikante, wenn auch unterbelichtete, Rolle. Neuankömmlinge, die aus dem ländlichen Raum oder aus anderen Bundesländern stammen, sowie jene, die gegenwärtig in informellen Siedlungen leben, waren zum Zeitpunkt der Migrationsentscheidung überproportional stark von Dürren betroffen. Die Analysen beleuchten die bidirektionalen Verflechtungen zwischen Urbanisierung und FWE-Nexus-Aspekten: Die wachsende Stadt ist bereits heute Treiber und zugleich Leidtragende von FWE-Nexusproblemen. Diese müssen umfassend angegangen werden, um Wege zu einer nachhaltigen und resilienten urbanen Zukunft zu sichern.:1. General Introduction: Context, Approach, and Summary of Results 1.1. Background and Research Motivation 1.2. Case study site Pune 1.3. Knowledge Gaps 1.4. Problem Definition and Research Questions 1.5. Research Approach and Methodological Overview 1.5.1. Identification of the main sustainability challenges related to urbanization 1.5.2. Modeling of future urban growth 1.5.3. In-depth investigation of mobility to Pune 1.5.4. Integration 1.6. Summary and Linking of Results 1.6.1. Results of Paper 1 1.6.2. Results of Paper 2 1.6.3. Results of Paper 3 1.7. Discussion 1.8. Conclusion and Outlook Paper 1: Capturing Stakeholders’ Challenges of the Food–Water–Energy Nexus— A Participatory Approach for Pune and the Bhima Basin, India Paper 2: On Farmland and Floodplains – Modeling Urban Growth Impacts Based on Global Population Scenarios in Pune, India Paper 3: Exploring the Relationship Between Droughts and Rural-to-urban Mobility – a Mixed-Methods Approach for Pune, India Appendix / Many countries in the global South are experiencing the combined dynamics of rapid urbanization and global environmental change. The provision of sustainable and resilient cities is a declared global goal (SDG11). Urbanization has been associated with multiple benefits on societal and individual level. However, it can also entail adverse impacts on natural resources, overstrain supply systems, and create new vulnerabilities. The interlinked nature of challenges requires an interdisciplinary research approach. Over the last decade, the Food-Water-Energy (FWE) nexus has been popularized for inter-sectoral analyses. This thesis attempts to add to the understanding of the FWE nexus in rapidly urbanizing regions of the global South and to address shortcomings in the current debate. The work is centered around the emerging megacity of Pune in India. For a comprehensive understanding of the system under investigation, a set of 22 FWE challenges on various levels is co-produced with local stakeholders. Subsequent analyses investigate selected urbanization-related challenges in-depth, namely future trajectories of the city’s growth and in-migration as one of its main drivers. To that end, a novel modeling approach is presented, downscaling established high-level socioeconomic scenarios to the city level and translating them into built-up area mapped by a cellular automaton. Population surfaces are then generated via dasymetric mapping. The resulting spatial configurations of built-up and population scenarios are analyzed in terms of potential FWE nexus challenges. The analysis of in-migration to Pune is based on qualitative and quantitative data sources and their mixed methods analysis. The significant demographic, economic, and spatial growth expected in all scenarios is associated with a concentration of resource demands in the city, significant loss of fertile land, and an increase in flood-affected population and infrastructure. As to in-migration, climate change has played a role in mobility to Pune in the form of droughts, especially for recent arrivals. Rural-origin migrants, those who came from other states, and who currently live in informal settlements were disproportionately affected by droughts at origin. The results shed light on the bidirectional interlinkages between urbanization and FWE nexus issues: Today already, the growing city of Pune drives, and suffers from, nexus challenges. These have to be addressed comprehensively in order to secure pathways to a sustainable and resilient urban future.:1. General Introduction: Context, Approach, and Summary of Results 1.1. Background and Research Motivation 1.2. Case study site Pune 1.3. Knowledge Gaps 1.4. Problem Definition and Research Questions 1.5. Research Approach and Methodological Overview 1.5.1. Identification of the main sustainability challenges related to urbanization 1.5.2. Modeling of future urban growth 1.5.3. In-depth investigation of mobility to Pune 1.5.4. Integration 1.6. Summary and Linking of Results 1.6.1. Results of Paper 1 1.6.2. Results of Paper 2 1.6.3. Results of Paper 3 1.7. Discussion 1.8. Conclusion and Outlook Paper 1: Capturing Stakeholders’ Challenges of the Food–Water–Energy Nexus— A Participatory Approach for Pune and the Bhima Basin, India Paper 2: On Farmland and Floodplains – Modeling Urban Growth Impacts Based on Global Population Scenarios in Pune, India Paper 3: Exploring the Relationship Between Droughts and Rural-to-urban Mobility – a Mixed-Methods Approach for Pune, India Appendix

A sustainable supply of fresh water for the human population is a global concern. Intriguingly, about 70% of the total fresh water consumed in the world annually is claimed by agriculture alone; this fraction is even higher in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, where natural regeneration of groundwater is the slowest. Thus, there is a serious need for innovative materials and technologies to enhance the efficiency water usage in agriculture. To this end, plastic mulches have been employed across the developed world to minimize evaporative loss of water from top-soils. While plastic mulches are inexpensive, they do require specialized farm machinery for installation and long processing times. On one hand, plastic mulches have proven to increase crop yields, but on the other their non-biodegradability poses serious environmental concerns. In response, development of low-cost bio-/photo-degradable artificial mulches remains an area of intense research. In this thesis, we report on a novel superhydrophobic material exploiting inexpensive simple components to reduce the amount of water required for irrigation in agriculture by suppressing evaporative losses from the top-soil. Our material consists of ordinary beach sand coated with < 20 nm thick layer of paraffin wax. We synthesized and extensively characterized our material and applied them as mulches for tomato and barley plants at the KAUST greenhouse. We found that when a ~5 mm thick layer of superhydrophobic sand was placed onto the top-soil in pots, it dramatically suppressed evaporative losses and significantly enhanced the yields. Our preliminary field-scale experiments with tomatoes and barley crops at the Hada Al Sham site corroborate these results. Our approach might find applications in desert agriculture and other fields and alleviate water stress in the MENA region.

Food, water and energy are three essential resources for human well-being, poverty reduction and sustainable development. These resources are very much linked to one another, meaning that the actions in any one particular area often can have effects in one or both of the other areas. At the same time, an economy's shift towards climate neutrality requires a massive expansion of energy production from renewable sources. Among these ground-mounted photovoltaic (PV) and biomass will be expanded massively to meet the clean energy generation goal, simultaneously influence regional water and food availability and supply security. It is crucial to understand Food-Water-Energy Nexus (FWE) nexus during the energy transition. However, current studies have limitation both methodically (qualitative assessments) and spatially (aggregated data on a national level is more available). Firstly, a consistent share input data set in geographical format was created with the resolution of building/field. An energy simulation platform (SimStadt) was then extended with new workflows on biomass potential, ground-mounted PV potential, food demand/potential, and urban water demand. Combining with existing workflows on urban building heating/electricity demand and roof PV potential, the dissertation created a complete simulation environmental covering most-relating FWE topics in energy transition with consistent input and output structures at a fine resolution. Secondly, the most representative inter-linkage between ground-mounted PV and biomass on hinterland is investigated in details with the new tools. The output data of each field from ground-mounted PV and biomass workflows are linked and ranked according to the scenarios emphasizing PV yield, feasibility, profit, or biomass. The assessment and scenarios are applied at three representative German counties with distinguished land-use structures and geometries as case studies. Results show that current policies does not guarantee the technically efficient allocation of fields. The optimal technical strategy is to follow the individual market profit drive, which is very likely, at the same time for the social good, to achieve high PV yields with limited biomass losses and more significant crop water-saving effects. The local food, water, and energy demands are also included as a metric for resource allocation on the potential side. Besides focusing on the biomass-PV tradeoff simulation and analysis, pioneer works have also been done to test the transferability of the method in cases outside Germany, and the complement of urban solid waste to agricultural biomass is explored to achieve energy autarky.

A quantitative assessment of food-water-energy interactions is important to assess pathways and scenarios towards a holistically sustainable regional development. While a range of tools and methods exist that assess energetic demands and potentials on a regional scale, the same is not true for assessments of regional food demand and potential. This work introduces a new food simulation workflow to address local food potential and demand at the regional level, by extending an existing regional energy-water simulation platform. The goal of this work is to develop a GIS-based bottom-up approach to simulate regional food demand that can be linked to similarly GIS-based workflows assessing regional water demands and energetic demands and potentials. This allows us to study food-water-energy issues on a local scale. For this, a CityGML land use data model is extended with a feed and animal potential raster map as well as a soil type map to serve as the main inputs. The workflow simulates: (1) the vegetal and animal product food potentials by taking climate, crop type, soil type, organic farming, and food waste parameters into account; (2) the food demand of vegetal and animal products influenced by population change, body weight, age, human development index, and other indicators. The method is tested and validated in three German counties with various land use coverages. The results show that restricting land used exclusively for energy crop production is the most effective way to increase annual food production potential. Climate change by 2050 is expected to result in annual biomass yield changes between −4% and 2% depending on the region. The amount of animal product consumption is expected to rise by 16% by 2050, while 4% fewer vegetal products are excepted to be consumed.

Världens befolkning och städer växer. I takt med detta ökar efterfrågan på tillgångar av mat, energi och vatten och det finns efterfrågan på tillvägagångssätt som tar hänsyn till både synergier och konflikter mellan dessa. Ett projekt som syftade till att skapa kunskap inom dessa samband genom att använda så kallade Urban Living Labs, ULLs, var det transnationella projektet CRUNCH. Urban Living Labs kan beskrivas som en slags samling tillvägagångssätt som betonar experimentella tillvägagångssätt och en hög nivå av deltagande och samskapande. Men ULLs har visat sig kunna se mycket olika ut och den här studien är ett bidrag till den växande empirin inom ämnet. Studien analyserade hur en av de deltagande städerna inom CRUNCH arbetat med samverkan och samskapande och vilka hinder och möjligheter ULL har som tillvägagångssätt för deltagande, samverkan och samskapande. Detta gjordes genom en kvalitativ fallstudie av Uppsalas ULL Rosendal och analyserades genom teorier om deltagande och kollaborativ governance. Studien fann att deltagandet var smalt och främst skedde genom konsultation och information. De främsta möjligheterna till samarbete verkade vara de inledande villkoren och ett ömsesidigt beroende mellan parterna för att få finansiering till att utveckla sina idéer. De främsta hindren verkade finnas i en obalans i resurser vad gäller finansiering och möjligheter att delta. Men det kanske allra främsta hindret var dock en bristande delad förståelse av begreppet ULL. Begreppet sattes snarare som en ”stämpel” på projekt som redan fanns utan att tillföra dem något extra i form av deltagande eller samverkan. / The world's population and cities are growing. As the demand for food, energy and water resources increases there is a demand for approaches that consider both synergies and conflicts between them. One project that aimed to create knowledge in this nexus by using something called Urban Living Labs, ULLs, was the transnational project CRUNCH. Urban Living Labs can be described as a collection of approaches that emphasizes experimental approaches and a high level of participation and co-creation. But ULLs have been shown to take a variety of different forms and this study is a contribution to the growing empirical evidence in the subject. The study analysed how one of the participating cities within CRUNCH worked with collaboration and co-creation and what obstacles and opportunities ULL has as an approach for participation, collaboration, and co-creation. This was done through a qualitative case study of Uppsala's ULL Rosendal and analysed through theories of participation and collaborative governance. The study found that participation was narrow and mainly took place through consultation and information. The main opportunities for cooperation seemed to be the initial starting conditions and an interdependence between the partners to get funding to develop their ideas. The main obstacles seemed to be resource imbalances in terms of funding and means to participate. But perhaps the main obstacle was a lack of shared understanding of the main concept of ULL. The term was rather applied as a label on projects that already existed, without adding anything extra to them in terms of participation or collaboration.