چكيده به لاتين
Following the evolution of integrated approaches for environmental management, such as water-food-trade (virtual water) thinking, Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM), and Integrated Natural Resources Management (INRM), and towards accomplishing the Sustainable Development Goals, the Water-Energy-Food (WEF) Nexus was introduced in the recent years as a comprehensive alternative and was used wildly in research which provided the thinking background of the analysis of complicated, intertwined, water, energy, and food systems. The nexus approach (thinking), in simple terms, deals with the interlinkage within these three recourses by considering their synergies, trade-offs, interactions, relationship with land use, and effects of climate change on each of them. Numerous sources of uncertainties, the inherent complexity, and problems associated with gathering and utilizing data, lack of global consensus on a specific accounting framework, as well as the absence of a (globally) accessible platform capable of simultaneous quantitative, qualitative, and spatial analysis have increased the difficulties of research in this field.
One of the most common methods in analyzing WEF nexus systems is the Multi-Scale Integrated Analysis of Societal and Ecosystem Metabolism (MuSIASEM), which has been evolving since the beginning of the current century. In 2014, the second version, named MuSIASEM 2.0, was introduced and has been increasingly used in nexus studies. The debut of the framework goes back to 1999 for analyzing energy flows in agricultural systems. However, over time, the capability of analyzing monetary flows, land use, demographic, water, and food data was added to the framework and made it one of the most popular sustainability assessment methods, especially in the nexus field. Based on the literature review conducted on this research, more than one hundred scientific articles, books, and reports have benefited from this method in their sustainability studies and environmental projects in more than sixty countries worldwide.
Regrettably, so far, no specialized software or platform, neither for diagnostic/simulation analysis nor for decision support, is designed. Researchers must learn how to use various geospatial analysis software to conduct resource accounting studies, even without data visualization or sharing capability. To overcome these limitations, this study aims to design and develop a web-based spatial decision support tool with interactive maps where the user can analyze a nexus system within the MuSIASEM 2.0 framework, simulate various scenarios, and with the help of visualized results and spatial maps, conduct feasibility, viability, and desirability checks for different strategies to reach the best and most sustainable decision.
An introduction to this research's subject, goals, and novelties is presented in the first chapter. The subsequent chapter addresses the concepts of sustainability assessment and water-energy-food nexus and a literature review on applications of WebGIS technology in environmental studies. The third chapter deals with designing the application, first by discussing the jargon and mechanism of the MuSIASEM framework. This study's core lies in the fourth chapter, which details the step-by-step development procedure, technology stack, and system architecture. Since evaluation is an inseparable part of any application (desktop or web-based), this chapter's final discussion is dedicated to this aim. In the last chapter, a summary of the research, a discussion on the results, and suggestions for future development are discussed. To better understand the context, abbreviated and technical words are linked to the abbreviation list and technical dictionary presented respectively at the beginning and end of this thesis.
