1 A novel causal structure-based framework for comparing basin- 2 wide water-energy-food-ecology nexus applied to the data- 3 limited Amu Darya and Syr Darya river basins 4 Haiyang Shi1,2,4,5, Geping Luo1,2,3,5, Hongwei Zheng1, Chunbo Chen1, Olaf Hellwich6, Jie Bai1, Tie 5 Liu1,5, Shuang Liu1, Jie Xue1, Peng Cai1,4, Huili He1,4, Friday Uchenna Ochege1,2, Tim van de 6 Voorde4,5, and Phillipe de Maeyer1,2,4,5 7 8 1 State Key Laboratory of Desert and Oasis Ecology, Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography, Chinese Academy 9 of Sciences, Urumqi, Xinjiang, 830011, China. 10 2 University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, 19 (A) Yuquan Road, Beijing, 100049, China. 11 3 Research Centre for Ecology and Environment of Central Asia, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Urumqi, China. 12 4 Department of Geography, Ghent University, Ghent 9000, Belgium. 13 5 Sino-Belgian Joint Laboratory of Geo-Information, Ghent and Urumqi. 14 6 Department of Computer Vision & Remote Sensing, Technische Universität Berlin, 10587 Berlin, Germany 15 Correspondence to: Geping Luo (
[email protected]) 16 17 Submitted to Hydrology and Earth System Sciences 18 Special issue: Socio-hydrology and Transboundary Rivers 19 1 20 Abstract. The previous comparative studies on watersheds were mostly based on the comparison of dispersive 21 characteristics, which lacked systemicity and causality. We proposed a causal structure-based framework for basin 22 comparison based on the Bayesian network (BN), and focus on the basin-scale water-energy-food-ecology (WEFE) 23 nexus. We applied it to the Syr Darya river basin (SDB) and the Amu Darya river basin (ADB) of which the poor 24 water management caused the Aral Sea disaster.