Food, energy and water (FEW) are the three essential pillars for human-being and society. Agricultural land is the largest ecosystem to provide food for human by consuming a large amount of energy and water. As population increases, there is an increasing pressure to address issues of the resource allocation and other conflicting objectives. Systematic thinking based on food-energy-water nexus (FEW-N) is necessary for the modeling and the optimization of the systems. However, challenges arise in making decisions among conflicting objectives, such as the profit, the food demand, the friendly environment, and the efficient use of water and energy. Despite the global studies of data, models and multi-objective optimization techniques, the holistic studies navigating the land use problems, exploring the trade-offs of land and the FEW resources are still few and far between, as well as the general and quantitative metrics for different solutions of the land use systems. Taking an experimental station in Shandong province as a FEW-N land use system, series of composite FEW-N metrics are developed to help solve the multiobjective optimization problem with systematic assessments. Computational results indicate that the trade-offs among diverse stakeholders can be achieved most effectively and consistently based on the composite FEW-N metrics. All objective-related solutions can be quantitatively evaluated by the proposed metrics, and the geometric metric GA can provide a visualization tool for comparisons of different solutions, to help the policy-makers to adjust policies across different stakeholders, production sectors, and technologies.

land use optimization and decision  /  food-energy-water nexus  /  multi-objective optimization  /  metric