Sustainable Cities: KTH FOOD Researchers on Urban Resilience and Agriculture
In two newly published articles, KTH FOOD researchers and colleagues discuss urban agriculture and resilience.
Climate Change in Urban Areas
In the article Examining urban resilience through a food-water-energy nexus lens to understand the effects of climate change, KTH FOOD’s Co-director Rebecka Milestad and her colleagues Mari R. Tye, Olga Wilhelmi, Jennifer Boehnert, Emily Faye, Andrea L. Pierce and Pia Laborgne investigate how climate change affects urban areas and populations.
The article focuses on urban centers in coastal areas, whose populations are highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Not only do high population densities and independent social-ecological systems pose challenges, but the growing demand for resources is an issue as well. By exposing the areas already sensitive to extreme weather, the urban systems that will be least resilient to climate change can be highlighted. The study maps projected changes in water availability onto the food-water-energy Nexus at various spatial scales, and a case study is used to illustrate how climate change effects in distant areas can impact urban resilience through cascading Nexus effects.
Read the full article here .
Sustainability in Urban Agriculture
In the recent publication Sustainability assessments of commercial urban agriculture – a scoping review, KTH researchers Rebecka Milestad, Annelise de Jong, Maria Bustamante and Michael Martin and colleagues Elvira Molin and Carrie Malone Friedman analyze sustainability assessments of urban agriculture for commercial implementation.
Despite urban agriculture gaining attention as a potential solution to food insecurity and environmental challenges, there is limited research on its sustainability claims. Therefore, this study explores how sustainability analyses of urban agriculture are conducted, what they conclude and what use authors anticipate their sustainability assessments to have. The study also examines which sustainability aspects are considered and what conclusions are drawn from these analyses. It concludes that comparisons of environmental benefits across different urban agriculture systems were inconclusive, which indicates that urban agriculture’s sustainability should be assessed in relation to specific environmental conditions and urban contexts since they cannot be universally categorized.
Read the full article here .