Global urbanization and food production in direct competition for land: Leverage places to mitigate impacts on SDG2 and on the Earth System

Abstract

Global urbanization and food production are in direct competition for land. This paper carries out a critical review of how displacing crop production from urban and peri-urban land to other areas – because of issues related to soil quality – will demand a substantially larger proportion of the Earth’s terrestrial land surface than the surface area lost to urban encroachment. Such relationships may trigger further distancing effects and unfair social-ecological teleconnections. It risks also setting in motion amplifying effects within the Earth System. In combination, such multiple stressors set the scene for food riots in cities of the Global South. Our review identifies viable leverage points on which to act in order to navigate urban expansion away from fertile croplands. We first elaborate on the political complexities in declaring urban and peri-urban lands with fertile soils as one global commons. We find that the combination of an advisory global policy aligned with regional policies enabling robust common properties rights for bottom-up actors and movements in urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) as multi-level leverage places to intervene. To substantiate the ability of aligning global advisory policy with regional planning, we review both past and contemporary examples where empowering local social-ecological UPA practices and circular economies have had a stimulating effect on urban resilience and helped preserve, restore, and maintain urban lands with healthy soils.

Countryside within the City: A Motivating Vision behind Civic Green Area Stewardship in Warsaw, Poland

“…The relationships between rural and urban and the blurring distinctions between them are important questions for urban sustainability [63]. The traditional way of thinking about those two categories in terms of opposition is problematic [69] as "urbanity" in the countryside provides social services and since urban gardening and food production can be "a fully integrated urban activity" [70] (p. 232). The motivating vision that emerged from the interview data about the "countryside within the city" is precisely an expression of the blurring of the boundaries between traditional thinking about urban and rural [28].…”

“…Drawing on the recent insights in ecological psychology, stewardship action may have a global sustainability implication in simultaneously shaping behavior and environmental attitudes among two-thirds of the global population in the urban Anthropocene [12,14,71]-a view with roots in Bem's [7] self-perception theory of attitude change, which assumes that people acquire positive attitudes toward an attitudinal object because of what they do behaviorally (as opposed to the opposite assumption that people behave in certain ways because they like it). For instance, food cultivation activities are a sustainability issue of great importance especially for people in cities [9,23,69]. Urban gardening and agriculture could contribute to achieving higher levels of local food availability, to social learning about how food is produced and the emergence of environmental values from engaging in collective urban cultivation practices.…”

Cahokia: Urbanization, Metabolism, and Collapse

“…Thus, to support the great public undertakings at Cahokia and other mound centers, those left in the countryside would have needed greatly to intensify their production. As argued below, the rural population supporting the metropolis would have needed to farm on less desirable land than Cahokia itself occupied (Dalan et al, 2003, p. 85;Barthel et al, 2019), with an increase in the cost of transporting food. Cahokia was built at a cost of demonstrably higher labor per capita.…”

“…Such optimal land is converted to urban uses. Population aggregation and continued growth must then be sustained by less productive land (Barthel et al, 2019), or land some distance away (such as the Richland Complex sites, as described above). This forces cities to undertake the cost of transporting food, and creates pressure to cultivate intensively.…”

Desempenho ambiental e energético da gaseificação de biomassa de cana-de-açúcar como rota alternativa de produção de amônia.

“…Vivendo em zonas de fome, que em muitos casos eram também áreas ecologicamente vulneráveis, esse contingente já se defrontava cotidianamente com condições bastante desfavoráveis, marcadas pela elevada concentração populacional, e a deterioração dos ecossistemas (BARTHEL et al, 2019).…”