Fifteen years after the water, energy, food and environment (WEFE) nexus was introduced at the 2011 Bonn Conference, most governments and development banks still work in silos, researchers told a session at Stockholm World Water Week 2026. The session, titled Operationalizing the WEFE Nexus for Climate-Resilient and Equitable Water Security, set out what has moved the idea from pilots into practice in Asia, according to a report published by CGIAR.
"The question is not whether the nexus concept is sound, but why it has struggled to move from frameworks and pilots into mainstream governance and investment," said the moderator, Novaira Junaid of the International Water Management Institute (IWMI).
In Pakistan's Indus River Basin, where agriculture takes 90% of the water used, Mohsin Hafeez of IWMI described a spatial simulation model built with the University of Manchester that tracks water from upstream reservoirs to downstream farms. It helps the Punjab Irrigation Department and the Indus River System Authority weigh the daily trade-off between holding water for hydropower and releasing it for irrigation, while decision-support dashboards are used to guide farmers away from thirsty rice and sugarcane towards crops that need less water and earn more per drop.
Solar power has brought a new risk. Claudia Ringler of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) said that because solar energy is essentially free once installed, Pakistani farmers may over-pump groundwater or fit oversized pumps. Groundwater literacy and pump-sizing tools at community level are the answer she described, alongside a Groundwater Management Information System that gives authorities real-time aquifer data to impose local pumping moratoriums.
In northern India, mapping how much water a third, summer rice season drained led the authorities to ban that crop, cutting local water use by 25% in one year, a saving of 48 million cubic metres, said Anton Urfels of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI). IRRI's data also show that modernising irrigation on just 9% of South Asia's farmland could feed another 33 million people.
Bangladesh featured twice. Vishwa Ranjan Sinha of IUCN said floods in the Barak-Meghna basin, shared with India, cause hundreds of millions of dollars of damage a year to fisheries and farming, and argued that wetlands should be treated as natural water infrastructure. The report also cites the Ichamati River, where an embankment cut off the river's flow, killed off local fish and dried up groundwater for farmers. Tanya Huizer of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) said the Jamuna-Dhaka river system supports 80 million people and half of the country's GDP, and that ADB is now sequencing investments in water, farming, navigation and urban growth along that corridor.
ADB's Satoshi Ishii said nearly half of the 50 economies in Asia and the Pacific show declining ecosystem health, and that the bank plans to launch a 10-year water security initiative at its annual meeting in Nagoya, Japan, in May 2027. IWMI's Director General, Mark Smith, said the hardest barrier left is the working habits of people and institutions, not the tools.
Photo: CGIAR (CC BY 4.0)
Source: CGIAR
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