Sustainable water–energy–environment nexus

Abstract

Water–energy–environment has been closely interwoven among the natural, social, and economic networks. Integration of energy, water, and environment systems is essential in the multidisciplinary concept of sustainable development, which is a highly multidisciplinary field of research that has been extensively studied during the last two decades. This special issue discusses some of the latest progress in three main areas of sustainability themes, i.e., energy, water, and environment, that emerged from the International Symposium on Water Resource and Environmental Management held in 2019 (WREM 2019). After a meticulous peer-review process, thirteen (13) high scientific-level papers have been accepted for publication. They mainly concern sustainable development of energy, water, and environment systems. The first paper is entitled “An impact assessment of energy undesirable output on climate-carrying capacity: a case study of Shanghai” (Shan and Wang 2020). In this work, the impact of undesirable energy output on the climate-carrying capacity of the power grid–based economy in Shanghai has been studied. The authors used three indicators, i.e., climate natural capacity, urban climate pressure, and urban coordinated development capacity, as input factors to study the climatecarrying capacity. The efficiency and performance efficiency of climate environmental carrying capacity are found both lower than 0.8. The second paper is entitled “Ecological treatment technology for agricultural non-point source pollution in remote rural areas of China” (Yi et al. 2020). The paper introduced the practical application of ecological treatment technology. Eco-processing technologies are cost-effective in terms of their construction, maintenance, and energy needs and can be considered a sustainable wastewater treatment method, especially in remote areas and developing countries. The paper provides basic ideas for the construction of rural ecological treatment technology in China and puts forward suggestions and ideas for the future development trend of ecological treatment process sewage. The third paper is entitled “Toward ecological function zoning and comparison to the Ecological Redline Policy: a case study in the Poyang Lake Region, China” (Xu et al. 2021). In this work, multiple ecosystem services were quantified and mapped; the ecological function zoning strategy was promoted based on the importance and vulnerability analysis of ecosystem services in Poyang Lake Region, China. By comparing the ecological function zoning strategy with the Ecological Redline Policy (ERP) and discussing the implications and applications of ecological management, this study contributes to achieve high-efficiency ecological protection of Poyang Lake at the regional scale and compare the different zoning results in the same region with different space scales. The fourth paper is entitled “An in-depth quantitative analysis of wind turbine blade tip wake flow based on the lattice Boltzmann method” (Wu et al. 2020). In this work, the state-of-the-art lattice Boltzmann method (LBM), combining with large eddy simulation (LES) and wall-adapting local-eddy (WALE) model, was used to investigate the unsteady flow characteristics of the blade tip region due to impeller wake for a wind turbine. The calculation model of LBM was proven reasonable and effective with the associated experimental data. The relevant in-depth results clearly showed a series of characteristics and changing laws for the dynamic spiral structure in tip wake area and the static pressure distribution on blade surface as well as the closely related indicators. Responsible Editor: Philippe Garrigues