Water, energy and food security: Applying Wiener's theories to validate a macro-economic nexus model

Water Energy and Food Security for all are the primary aspirations of the global community. It is also singularly the most important and challenging “Global Strategic Problem” the global community faces today, as global concerns about limited access to these three fundamentals for life are compounded by growing concerns about their future availability and sustainability. To effectively deal with this Global Strategic Problem - and realise long-term water, energy, and food security - we need to acknowledge and better understand its key drivers and issues. For example, water, energy and food are not only inseparably linked, but they also underpin the development and expansionary nature of current global trade and productivity models. This exploitative and unsustainable approach, which relies on physically and environmentally limited resources, presents an enormous challenge to find niche and technological innovations to continue. A window of opportunity exists to adapt to a changed regime that focuses more on the inter-related outcomes than on single issue, single industry or individual nation considerations. It is argued that “sustained prosperity” is the true aspirational goal of the modern era, and that it is only attainable as a direct outcome of achieving water, energy and food security through a nexus approach. In this paper, the author's proposed new dynamic model for global macro-economics, based on the Water, Energy and Food Security Nexus, is presented and validated against several of Norbert Wiener's theories in relation to closed loop feedback control systems and System-of-Systems.