WEF nexus trends, opportunities, barriers, foresight, and future direction beyond 2030

The water-energy-food (WEF) nexus is transitioning into a vital transformative framework for promoting sustainable development across spatial scales and sectors in an era of mounting resource insecurity, environmental degradation, and climate change. It is envisioned to enhance resource-use efficiency, climate change adaptation, policy coherence, and sustainable development. Nevertheless, challenges remain, particularly in its implementation, including knowledge gaps, misunderstandings, and misconceptions in the absence of a practical operationalization mechanism and harmonized, coherent governance structures. This systematic review assesses the trends, opportunities, barriers, foresight, and future direction of the WEF nexus beyond the 2030 global sustainable development agenda, highlighting the factors limiting its adoption and operationalization and offering policy recommendations. WEF nexus technological innovations are key to countering operationalization barriers. Its future use depends on adopting integrated, cross-sectoral frameworks and analytical tools, improving data accessibility, gathering empirical evidence, building capacity, and encouraging multi-stakeholder engagement now.