Evaluating the Sustainability Priorities/performance using Ghana CLEWs Model

Background

As pressures on natural resources increase, countries pursue diverse and context specific pathways towards sustainable development. The Water-Energy-Food nexus has emerged as a crucial framework to evaluate the interactions between these resource systems. Analyzing the Water-Energy-Food nexus using modeling such as CLEWs framework is a complex task, shaped by diverse goals and context specific development priorities. Evaluating results of such complex models depends on the input data as well as the country specific context on development goals and policies. A central aim is to develop a systematic method for analyzing how sectoral policy priorities can be translated into modelling indicators, such as water stress, energy access, or land-use pressures. This study develops a method to align the priorities of the countries development goals with model outputs by using policy review, data analysis, and model assessment ensuring that CLEWs results more accurately reflect real development needs.

Areas for research

• Reviewing existing WEF indicators and how sectoral priorities are assessed

• Evaluating policy documents, long term sustainability goals in the context of Ghana related to water, energy, food and land sectors

• Integrated Energy modelling, understanding elements of an existing model and possibly updates to the model

• Developing new indicators to evaluate the modelling results to reflect context specific goals

Deliverables/outputs

This thesis project will involve developing indicators to assess CLEWs modelling results using data analysis methods and connect these to existing policy documents.

• Literature review on existing indicator study in WEF nexus and/energy models

• Develop method to evaluate indicators to evaluate contextual CLEWs models

• Implement methodology on existing CLEWs models

Duration

January - 4th of June 2026.

Division/Department

Division of Energy Systems – Department of Energy Technology

How to apply

Send an email expressing your interest in the topic to Shreyas Savanur (savanur@kth.se) or Shravan Kumar (skpk@kth.se).

Supervisory team

Examiner

Related literature

1. The climate, land, energy, and water systems (CLEWs) framework: a retrospective of activities and advances to 2019,Eunice Pereira Ramos et al 2021 Environ. Res. Lett. 16 033003 DOI 10.1088/1748-9326/abd34f

2. "Climate, Land, Energy and Water systems interactions – From key concepts to model implementation with OSeMOSYS": https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1462901122002167

3. "Effect of the sustainability indicators within OSeMOSYS optimization transition scenarios": https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211467X2400155X

4. "Sustainability assessment of energy systems: Indicators, methods, and applications": https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780128239872000167

5. Fuso Nerini, F., Sovacool, B., Hughes, N. et al. Connecting climate action with other Sustainable Development Goals. Nat Sustain 2, 674–680 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-019-0334-y

6. Soergel, B., Kriegler, E., Weindl, I. et al. A sustainable development pathway for climate action within the UN 2030 Agenda. Nat. Clim. Chang. 11, 656–664 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-021-01098-3

7. "Developing meaningful water-energy-food-environment (WEFE) nexus indicators with stakeholders: An Upper White Nile case study": https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969724029863