The Water-Energy-Food Nexus represents a potentially transformative way of addressing the relationships between three critical resource sectors including water resources, energy systems, and food production. 

Often the decisions made in these three sectors are siloed, optimizing the benefits for one sector without giving full consideration of the impacts on the other two sectors. More integrated planning of the areas where these three sectors have mutual interests could increase the economic efficiency of the three sectors, reduce competition between the sectors, identify synergies where policy approaches and infrastructure may be designed to advance the goals of all three sectors, and to aid in the development of coherent approaches to local development issues such as land-use decisions and global policy issues such as sustainable development and climate change. The implementation of the nexus approach can be most successful if it is supported by the promotion and achievement of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) that relate to Water, Energy and Food.

The GEO EO4WEF Community Activity develops and promotes ways in which Earth observations can be more effectively incorporated into the planning and management of the nexus between these three resource areas. GEO members play important roles in collecting, archiving, and disseminating the relevant data and in developing the policy frameworks which will allow the WEF Nexus concept to be implemented. This activity supports GEO efforts to use its capabilities to better support the W-E-F Nexus community.