Flow chart of security components and outcomes, indicating examples of the barriers and underlying causes that lead to the outcomes.
Climate changes and other factors threaten the availability of food, energy and water (FEW) in many parts of the world, including in rural Alaska. What can help? A new paper by Jen Schmidt and Henry Huntington describes a framework they developed to assess FEW security. It provides a consistent means of assessing problems, identifying causes and developing solutions by looking at four components of FEW security: availability, access, preference, and quality.
“From Metrics to Action: A Framework for Identifying Limiting Factors, Key Causes, and Possible Solutions in Food-Energy-Water Security” appears in Frontiers in Climate, a journal that publishes rigorously peer-reviewed, cutting-edge research on a broad range of topics that cover the applications of scientific advances in climate research.
“We are excited about this research because it goes beyond pointing out security or insecurity among food, energy, and water and identifies drivers and potential solutions,” Schmidt said. “Applying our framework to communities would go a long way to understanding and reducing FEW insecurity in Alaska.”
The paper includes a table with specific examples developed from household interviews and discussions with community leaders in four communities in rural Alaska. The table details causes, underlying problems and solutions for a variety of FEW security issues, like:
- Limited access to land for hunting affects food access.
- Low water levels limit driftwood, reducing energy availability.
- Lengthy supply chains lead to perishable foods going bad, affecting food quality.
For each issue, a possible short- and long-term solution is proposed.
Examples from rural Alaska of limiting factors, causes, and solutions based on literature and our research.
More broadly, community leaders and other decision makers can use the framework to develop solutions for individual communities.
Schmidt is Assistant Professor of Natural Resources Management and Policy at ISER, where her research interests include human dimensions of subsistence and sport harvest, land use, ecosystem management, ecosystem services, climate change, and wildfire.
This work was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, Award No. 1740075: INFEWS/T3: Coupling infrastructure improvements to food-energy-water system dynamics in small cold region communities: MicroFEWs.
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