The current and potential role of urban metabolism studies to analyze the role of food in urban sustainability

Abstract

Food supply chains are essential for urban sustainability. To reflect on the state of knowledge on urban food flows in urban metabolism research, and the actual and potential role of urban metabolism studies to tackle food sustainability in cities, we systematically review scientific research on food from an urban metabolism perspective and apply statistical and thematic analyses. The analysis of 89 studies provides insights as to the relation between food supply and (environmental and social dimensions of) urban sustainability. First, food is an important contributor to urban environmental impacts, if a consumption-based approach is adopted. Secondly, the social impacts of urban food supply remain scarcely studied in urban metabolism research, but emerging results on public health, malnutrition, and food waste appear promising. In parallel, we find that the findings of the studies fail to engage with debates present in the broader literature, such as that of food justice. Our analysis shows that most studies focus on large cities in high-income, data-rich countries. This limits our understanding of global urban food supply. Existing studies use innovative mixed-methods to produce robust accounts of urban food flows in data-scarce contexts; expanding these accounts is necessary to get a better understanding of how urban food supply and its diverse impacts in terms of environmental and social sustainability may vary across cities, a necessary step for the urban metabolism literature to contribute to current debates around food sustainability and justice. K E Y W O R D Sfood, industrial ecology, sustainability, systematic review, urban metabolism, urban political ecology INTRODUCTION The role of food supply in urban sustainabilityFood provision is an important sector to take into account for global environmental sustainability: Agriculture is responsible for the majority of the world's water eutrophication and freshwater use (FAO, 2011;Poore & Nemecek, 2018). The food sector (including production, commercialization, and consumption stages) accounts for 26% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (Poore & Nemecek, 2018). At the urban scale, food can be the biggest contributor to a city's environmental footprint (Moore et al., 2013). Given that the majority of the global population lives in cities (UNDES,This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

Role of Urban Metabolism Assessments in Addressing Food Security through Urban Agriculture in Informal Settlements: A Critical Review

“…In recent years, there has been a growing interest in applying UM assessments to informal settlements. Exploring the metabolic dynamics of these settlements not only reveals critical aspects of resource management, environmental impact, and resident well-being [25,26] but also equips researchers with tools to inform urban planning and policy formulation, addressing socioeconomic inequalities and enhancing sustainability in urban environments [27,28] . The study of interrelated water-energy systems and material flows in informal settlements is decisive for shaping urban resource management policies [29][30][31] .…”