Organic vegetables from community-supported agriculture in Italy: Emergy assessment and potential for sustainable, just, and resilient urban-rural local food production

Abstract

Global crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic highlight the interconnectedness and vulnerability of human systems, requiring integrated interdisciplinary studies aimed at breaking unsustainable and unjust practices. In this work, a horticultural collaborative production system is addressed, inspired by the community-supported agriculture (CSA) model. In a highly industrialised area of Northern Italy, with significant wild land consumption, an alternative bottom-up experience is described for the provision of vegetables in a short and cooperative not-for-sale supply chain. Local organic farming and just labour conditions seek ecological sustainability and social equity beyond market dynamics. This CSA project contributes to the resilience of a territory currently affected by health and economic plights. Its claims, limits, and potentials of a project of this kind are investigated for the first time by means of the Emergy Assessment (EMA). The socio-ecological and economic inputs in the system at issue are identified and quantified, partly eased by the transparent process of the target community, and some key indicators are calculated. This EMA provides fruitful insights of a single replicable and/or scalable project, thus offering current barrier and future opportunities for local improvement and exportability to crisis and post-crisis scenarios, and anyway for pursuing sustainability goals.

Emergy assessment to assess the ecological sustainability of smolt production and innovative options for the reuse and valorisation of aquaculture discards

“…The calculation of the UEVs for materialsmostly expressed in terms of specific emergyinclude the emergy requirements associated with the related inputs to produce them, ranging from raw materials (including their geobiophsyical generation and concentration, their extraction, and their processing) to human labour, passing through machineries, energy sources, and more; human labour is instead calculated based on the emergy per capita in a given geoeconomic context: emergy per capita in a year is associated to a fulltime worker and, for instance, a 50 % part-time worker will imply half of the annual emergy per capita to be allocated, thus including livelihoods, leisure, and whatever is not directly related to working hours but still functional to them. "More than simply an environmental accounting method, the emergy accounting approach allows one to keep track of both the natural cycles required to generate and concentrate resources over time and of the anthropic processes to extract, manufacture, and delivery such resources and/or more elaborated products and services" (Cristiano, 2021). Emergy may be considered as a development of the idea of embodied energy (EE) (Costanza, 1980).…”

Rethinking the sustainable development goals: Learning with and from community‐led initiatives

“…Many CLIs employ organic, regenerative and agroecological forms of food production and local/regional provision, including linking producers and consumers of food through mechanisms such as solidarity purchasing, communitysupported agriculture and farmers' markets. Sustainable and equitable provision of food is thus brought into synergy with creation of environmental, economic, social and cultural benefits (Cristiano, 2021). Quantitative assessments of short food supply chains, including Community Supported Agriculture, Urban Gardens, and Farmer Markets, show that these CLIs outperform conventional food retail and long food supply chains for most environmental and social assessment criteria (Doernberg et al, 2022)…”

Role of Social Inclusion in Sustainable Urban Developments: An Analyse by PRISMA Technique

“…The geographical and spatial structure plays an important role in economic and social development and through the descriptive structure analysis, urban geographical location, and transportation hub can be established [11,12]. There are certain policies to make fuel-free vehicles that can safely run on the existing infrastructure [13]. To ensure the long-term viability of urban transportation projects, an integrated multi-level strategy for transportation systems should be created [14].…”