Integrating climate change adaptation into water-energy-food-environment nexus for sustainable development in East African Community

The East African Community (EAC) region is highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, which pose significant challenges to water, energy, food, and environment systems. To address these challenges and promote sustainable development, it is essential to adopt an integrated approach that considers the complex interactions and trade-offs within the WEFE nexus. This research article focuses on the integration of climate change adaptation into the Water-Energy-Food-Environment (WEFE) nexus for sustainable development in EAC. In this study, the Panel Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) method was used for five proposed subsystems to assess both long and short-term influence of WEFE on economic development in EAC across the 1970 to 2021 period. The long-run results disclose that with an increase of 1% in agricultural production, renewable energy consumption, total emissions and total water withdraw increase economic development by 0.39%, 0.9%, 0.33%, 0.9%, respectively. The equilibrium of short-to long-run adjusted at the yearly rate of 0.18%. However, the challenges have seen in the light of climate change impacts including landslides, soil erosion, floods, and rise of the sea level which leads to environmental degradation and affect WEFE nexus and sustainable development. Therefore, the study argues that a fundamental strategy for overcoming these difficulties is to incorporate climate adaptation into the WEFE nexus. As such, it identifies the key drivers and pressures of climate change on the nexus, and proposes a framework for integrating climate change adaptation into WEFE nexus planning and management. •The potential and challenges of WEFE nexus toward sustainable development in EAC are assessed.•Climate change poses a threat to WEFE nexus and sustainable development in EAC.•Integration of climate change adaptation into WEFE nexus is a key toward sustainable development.•A framework to successful integration of climate change adaptation into WEFE nexus is proposed.