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| Titel |
The global potential of local peri-urban food production |
| VerfasserIn |
Steffen Kriewald, Anselmo Garcia Cantu Ros, Till Sterzel, Jürgen P. Kropp |
| Konferenz |
EGU General Assembly 2013
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| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
Englisch
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| Digitales Dokument |
PDF |
| Erschienen |
In: GRA - Volume 15 (2013) |
| Datensatznummer |
250079400
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| Zusammenfassung |
| One big challenge for the rest of the 21st century will be the massive urbanisation. It is
expected that more than 7 out of 10 persons will live in a city by the year 2050. Crucial
developments towards a sustainable future will therefore take place in cities. One important
approach for a sustainable city development is to re-localize food production and to
close urban nutrient cycles through better waste management. The re-location of
food production avoids CO2 emissions from transportation of food to cities and
can also generate income for inhabitants. Cities are by definition locations where
fertility accumulates. As cities are often built along rivers, their soils are often fertile.
Furthermore, labour force and the possibility of producing fertilizer from human fecal
matter within the city promises sustainable nutrients cycles. Although urban and
peri-urban agriculture can be found in many cities worldwide and already have a
substantial contribution to food supply, it has not jet been comprehensibly structured by
research.
We combine several worldwide data sets to determine the supply of cities with
regional food production, where regional is defined as a production that occurs very
close to the consumption within the peri-urban area. Therefore, urban areas are not
defined by administrative boundaries but by connected built-up urban areas, and
peri-urban area by the surrounding area with the same size multiplied with a scaling
parameter. Both together accumulate to an urban-bio-region (UBR). With regard to
national food consumption, a linear program achieves the best possible yield on
agricultural areas and allows the computation of the fraction of population, which can be
nourished. Additionally, several climate scenarios and different dietary patterns were
considered.
To close the gap between single case studies and to provide a quantitative overview of the
global potential of peri-urban food production we used high resolution land-use data Global
Land Cover Service (GlobCover), the global agricultural yield dataset from the Global
Agro-ecological Zones (GAEZ) and census population data from the Global Rural-Urban
Mapping Project, Version 1 (GRUMPv1) to estimate the potential of 2838 UBR
worldwide.
With regard to making use of local circumstances, the results of potential worldwide
peri-urban agriculture emphasize the ongoing investigation of sustainable transitions of the
socio-ecologic system. Identifying areas for increased food production while maintaining
the natural resources and the urban needs will be a major task for cities in future. |
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