IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/gam/jsusta/v12y2020i24p10491-d462723.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Climate, Land, Energy, Water and Food Nexus Challenge in a Land Scarce Country: Innovations in the Netherlands

Author

Listed:
  • Davine N. G. Janssen

    (Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, 1049-001 Lisbon, Portugal
    Department of Energy Technology, KTH—Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm, SE-100 44 Stockholm, Sweden)

  • Eunice Pereira Ramos

    (Department of Energy Technology, KTH—Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm, SE-100 44 Stockholm, Sweden)

  • Vincent Linderhof

    (Wageningen Economic Research, Wageningen University Research, Prinses Beatrixlaan 582, 2595 BM Den Haag, The Netherlands)

  • Nico Polman

    (Wageningen Economic Research, Wageningen University Research, Prinses Beatrixlaan 582, 2595 BM Den Haag, The Netherlands)

  • Chrysi Laspidou

    (Department of Civil Engineering, University of Thessaly, 38334 Volos, Greece)

  • Dennis Fokkinga

    (DbV—Driven by Values, Kastanjelaan 400, 5616 LZ Eindhoven, The Netherlands)

  • Duarte de Mesquita e Sousa

    (Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, 1049-001 Lisbon, Portugal)

Abstract

The Netherlands has the ambitious target of transitioning to a low-carbon economy by 2050. One factor that may constrain this progress, however, is the large spatial requirements of renewable energy technologies, and resulting competition for land through interlinkages between the Climate (C), Land (L), Energy (E), Water (W) and Food (F) domains—the CLEWF nexus. This study aims at identifying innovations that can improve the performance of the nexus by addressing the land scarcity constraint while supporting the low-carbon economy transition. A framework for the identification of potential innovations applicable in the nexus context was developed and applied. It is derived from a Driver-Pressure-State-Impact-Response (DPSIR) analysis of land scarcity in the Dutch nexus and a stock-taking benchmarking analysis of European countries. An inventory of innovations was prepared based on several classifications of innovations, collecting examples from the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Latvia and Sweden. Three innovations were identified as particularly promising: district heating, Energy Service Companies and peak shaving through water pumping. Furthermore, the DPSIR framework was also used to identify overarching societal elements common to countries that successfully implemented sustainable innovations. These were found to relate to long-term political commitments, geopolitical and economic drivers, and pioneering approaches building from and towards national strengths.

Suggested Citation

  • Davine N. G. Janssen & Eunice Pereira Ramos & Vincent Linderhof & Nico Polman & Chrysi Laspidou & Dennis Fokkinga & Duarte de Mesquita e Sousa, 2020. "The Climate, Land, Energy, Water and Food Nexus Challenge in a Land Scarce Country: Innovations in the Netherlands," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(24), pages 1-27, December.
  • Handle: RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:12:y:2020:i:24:p:10491-:d:462723
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/24/10491/pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/24/10491/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Gault, Fred, 2018. "Defining and measuring innovation in all sectors of the economy," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 47(3), pages 617-622.
    2. Steven Sarasini, 2009. "Constituting leadership via policy: Sweden as a pioneer of climate change mitigation," Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, Springer, vol. 14(7), pages 635-653, October.
    3. Lund, H. & Möller, B. & Mathiesen, B.V. & Dyrelund, A., 2010. "The role of district heating in future renewable energy systems," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 35(3), pages 1381-1390.
    4. Fagerberg, Jan & Fosaas, Morten & Sapprasert, Koson, 2012. "Innovation: Exploring the knowledge base," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 41(7), pages 1132-1153.
    5. Marc Fleurbaey, 2009. "Beyond GDP: The Quest for a Measure of Social Welfare," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 47(4), pages 1029-1075, December.
    6. Timma, Lelde & Zoss, Toms & Blumberga, Dagnija, 2016. "Life after the financial crisis. Energy intensity and energy use decomposition on sectorial level in Latvia," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 162(C), pages 1586-1592.
    7. Aldieri, Luigi & Bruno, Bruna & Vinci, Concetto Paolo, 2019. "Does environmental innovation make us happy? An empirical investigation," Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 67(C), pages 166-172.
    8. Dodgson, JS & Spackman, M & Pearman, A & Phillips, LD, 2009. "Multi-criteria analysis: a manual," Economic History Working Papers 12761, London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Economic History.
    9. Thomas Hoppe & Gerdien De Vries, 2018. "Social Innovation and the Energy Transition," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 11(1), pages 1-13, December.
    10. Rasmussen, L. H., 2003. "A sustainable energy-system in Latvia," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 76(1-3), pages 1-8, September.
    11. ., 2006. "Sustainable Development," Chapters, in: David Alexander Clark (ed.), The Elgar Companion to Development Studies, chapter 123, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    12. James D Ward & Paul C Sutton & Adrian D Werner & Robert Costanza & Steve H Mohr & Craig T Simmons, 2016. "Is Decoupling GDP Growth from Environmental Impact Possible?," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 11(10), pages 1-14, October.
    13. Rezaie, Behnaz & Rosen, Marc A., 2012. "District heating and cooling: Review of technology and potential enhancements," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 93(C), pages 2-10.
    14. Unknown, 2016. "Energy for Sustainable Development," Conference Proceedings 253270, Guru Arjan Dev Institute of Development Studies (IDSAsr).
    15. Dziallas, Marisa & Blind, Knut, 2019. "Innovation indicators throughout the innovation process: An extensive literature analysis," Technovation, Elsevier, vol. 80, pages 3-29.
    16. Shipkovs, P. & Kashkarova, G. & Shipkovs, M., 1999. "Renewable energy utilization in Latvia," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 16(1), pages 1241-1244.
    17. Werner, Sven, 2017. "International review of district heating and cooling," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 137(C), pages 617-631.
    18. Wang, Yan, 2006. "Renewable electricity in Sweden: an analysis of policy and regulations," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 34(10), pages 1209-1220, July.
    19. Uba, Katrin, 2010. "Who formulates renewable-energy policy? A Swedish example," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 38(11), pages 6674-6683, November.
    20. Irandoust, Manuchehr, 2018. "Innovations and renewables in the Nordic countries: A panel causality approach," Technology in Society, Elsevier, vol. 54(C), pages 87-92.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Somayeh Rezaei Kalvani & Fulvio Celico, 2023. "The Water–Energy–Food Nexus in European Countries: A Review and Future Perspectives," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 15(6), pages 1-16, March.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Aunedi, Marko & Pantaleo, Antonio Marco & Kuriyan, Kamal & Strbac, Goran & Shah, Nilay, 2020. "Modelling of national and local interactions between heat and electricity networks in low-carbon energy systems," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 276(C).
    2. Fritz, M. & Plötz, P. & Schebek, L., 2022. "A technical and economical comparison of excess heat transport technologies," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 168(C).
    3. Inayat, Abrar & Raza, Mohsin, 2019. "District cooling system via renewable energy sources: A review," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 107(C), pages 360-373.
    4. Thomas Krikser & Adriano Profeta & Sebastian Grimm & Heiko Huther, 2020. "Willingness-to-Pay for District Heating from Renewables of Private Households in Germany," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(10), pages 1-14, May.
    5. Yuan, Jianjuan & Zhou, Zhihua & Tang, Huajie & Wang, Chendong & Lu, Shilei & Han, Zhao & Zhang, Ji & Sheng, Ying, 2020. "Identification heat user behavior for improving the accuracy of heating load prediction model based on wireless on-off control system," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 199(C).
    6. Xue, Puning & Jiang, Yi & Zhou, Zhigang & Chen, Xin & Fang, Xiumu & Liu, Jing, 2019. "Multi-step ahead forecasting of heat load in district heating systems using machine learning algorithms," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 188(C).
    7. Li, Haoran & Hou, Juan & Hong, Tianzhen & Ding, Yuemin & Nord, Natasa, 2021. "Energy, economic, and environmental analysis of integration of thermal energy storage into district heating systems using waste heat from data centres," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 219(C).
    8. Fritz, Markus & Werner, Dorian, 2022. "Industrial excess heat and residential heating: Potentials and costs based on different heat transport technologies," Working Papers "Sustainability and Innovation" S11/2022, Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research (ISI).
    9. Felten, Björn, 2020. "An integrated model of coupled heat and power sectors for large-scale energy system analyses," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 266(C).
    10. Su, Lingqi & Nie, Ting & On Ho, Chi & Yang, Zheng & Calvez, Philippe & Jain, Rishee K. & Schwegler, Ben, 2022. "Optimizing pipe network design and central plant positioning of district heating and cooling System: A Graph-Based Multi-Objective genetic algorithm approach," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 325(C).
    11. Sayegh, M.A. & Danielewicz, J. & Nannou, T. & Miniewicz, M. & Jadwiszczak, P. & Piekarska, K. & Jouhara, H., 2017. "Trends of European research and development in district heating technologies," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 68(P2), pages 1183-1192.
    12. Persson, Urban & Wiechers, Eva & Möller, Bernd & Werner, Sven, 2019. "Heat Roadmap Europe: Heat distribution costs," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 176(C), pages 604-622.
    13. Guelpa, Elisa & Bischi, Aldo & Verda, Vittorio & Chertkov, Michael & Lund, Henrik, 2019. "Towards future infrastructures for sustainable multi-energy systems: A review," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 184(C), pages 2-21.
    14. Michael-Allan Millar & Bruce Elrick & Greg Jones & Zhibin Yu & Neil M. Burnside, 2020. "Roadblocks to Low Temperature District Heating," Energies, MDPI, vol. 13(22), pages 1-21, November.
    15. Sovacool, Benjamin K. & Martiskainen, Mari, 2020. "Hot transformations: Governing rapid and deep household heating transitions in China, Denmark, Finland and the United Kingdom," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 139(C).
    16. Soheil Kavian & Mohsen Saffari Pour & Ali Hakkaki-Fard, 2019. "Optimized Design of the District Heating System by Considering the Techno-Economic Aspects and Future Weather Projection," Energies, MDPI, vol. 12(9), pages 1-30, May.
    17. Guelpa, Elisa & Verda, Vittorio, 2019. "Compact physical model for simulation of thermal networks," Energy, Elsevier, vol. 175(C), pages 998-1008.
    18. Valerie Eveloy & Dereje S. Ayou, 2019. "Sustainable District Cooling Systems: Status, Challenges, and Future Opportunities, with Emphasis on Cooling-Dominated Regions," Energies, MDPI, vol. 12(2), pages 1-64, January.
    19. Marius-Corneliu Marinaș & Marin Dinu & Aura-Gabriela Socol & Cristian Socol, 2018. "Renewable energy consumption and economic growth. Causality relationship in Central and Eastern European countries," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 13(10), pages 1-29, October.
    20. Rismanchi, B., 2017. "District energy network (DEN), current global status and future development," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 75(C), pages 571-579.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:12:y:2020:i:24:p:10491-:d:462723. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: MDPI Indexing Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.mdpi.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.