Prospective Environmental Assessment of Urban Agriculture Emerging-Systems

ended

Urban and peri-urban agriculture (UA) has emerged as a more sustainable alternative to produce food. UA has several types of emerging systems (ES) that are exponentially growing from an experimental to an industrial scale of development. UA-ES include vertical farming, integrated greenhouse rooftops in buildings, local woodsheds, etc. UA-ES are expected to reach mature levels of development in the mid to long-term future and are being designed to recirculate and minimise the use of resources (e.g. nutrients, water, substrates and CO2) for production of low carbon intensity food in cities, among other benefits. Therefore, it is expected that UA-ES will provide more sustainable food production compared to rural, more-traditional agriculture systems in terms of energy and water use as well as benefits for air quality and biodiversity in cities. Understanding and quantifying the effective contribution that UA-ES will make to the environmental sustainability of cities requires the ability to both evaluate UA-ES environmental impacts in the future and to compare them to the impacts of traditional agriculture in the same future context. The project PROspecTive Environmental AssessmeNt of Urban Agriculture-Emerging Systems (PROTEAN) will focus on developing temporally-explicit environmental impact assessment models for both UA-ES and traditional agriculture to determine the extent to which UA-ES may contribute to the sustainability of future food production. These ex-ante, temporally-explicit environmental impact assessments will also help to flag influenceable system parameters that can make UA-ES more environmentally sustainable in the future. Thus, future undesired environmental impacts, costs, and effects may be more easily avoided for UA-ES than for mature agriculture systems. Providing assertive guidance on how to improve UA-ES depends on our current capacity to understand the key leavers of change that may drive the future impacts of these systems.