On March 7, 2023, Professor Troy Rule from Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Conner School of Law delivered a guest lecture for ELP students and the Richardson community. The topic of the lecture was “Securing Resources for the Future: Positive-Sum Water-Energy-Food Nexus Governance,” which focused on the potential synergistic interactions between water, energy, and food security.

Professor Rule began the lecture by framing the issues of water, energy, and food security. He notes that in many policy decisions, policies aimed at promoting greater security of these resources.

As an example, Professor Rule discussed policies requiring a certain percentage ethanol in gasoline. These types of “Zero-Sum” governance policies, he argued, are often made with only one policy goal in mind of increasing energy production, but they ultimately reduce the amount of resources available for food production. He argues that such policies can be improved if decision-makers consider natural resources more in the context of their effects on each other. He likewise argued that policy makers should devote more attention to promoting technologies and development strategies that leverage synergistic relationships among food-, water-, and energy-security goals. For instance, “agrovoltaic” solar projects that place solar panels above crops have the potential to simultaneously increase food security, water security, and energy security. Such projects shift resource tradeoff frontiers outward, creating new production possibilities.

Professor Rule’s research and presentation on positive-sum nexus governance will assist current 2Ls who are currently writing their Second Year Seminar (SYS) papers on natural resource management and will hopefully inspire future SYS topics for the 1Ls who attended. You can read more about Professor Rule’s research on Water-Energy-Food interactions in his forthcoming article in the NYU Environmental Law Journal.

JB 3/27/2023