Table 1.
Examples of studies that estimate the potential contribution of urban agriculture.
Fig 1.
Calculating land area for urban food production.
Publicly available aerial imagery (CC BY 4.0) from Palmerston North City Council (2024), similar though not identical to the views obtained for the study using Google Earth. (A) Detail of the built urban boundary showing clear demarcation between urban environment and surrounding near-urban land (cemetery to east of urban area was excluded, as although part of ‘built’ space it is unlikely to be used for agriculture; also excluded was new development at the eastern boundary, as houses were not yet built). (B) Detail of coding residential lots for potential urban agriculture (UA)-space. Note coding of front yard and back yard where there is clear open space (front yard sighted on Google Street View and polygon drawn around clear yard space). Note paved driveway excluded, as well as trees, hedges, and areas with uncertain UA potential (not shown, meso-UA area, where the same process used for yards was applied to city green spaces).
Table 2.
Key variables considered in the analysis.
Fig 2.
Crop optimization results: Crops requiring least land area to feed one person - different agriculture types and post-catastrophe climate scenarios.
The figure shows the minimum land area required to feed one person in both the normal climate scenario (top panel) and nuclear winter scenario (bottom panel – only frost-resistant crops considered), whether deploying urban agriculture methods (UA) or near-urban industrial agricultural methods. Only the crops/crop combinations found to require the least and next least land area are displayed. Shorter bars in the graph indicate less land is required to provide protein and food energy needs (i.e., most optimal crops). Yields in the nuclear winter scenario are typical yields of frost-resistant crops and not adjusted here for reduced sunlight (see Table 3 for such an adjustment). GCR – global catastrophic risk; UA – urban agriculture.
Table 3.
Potential for UA to meet combined protein and food energy needs of the palmerston North population.
Table 4.
Additional near-urban land area (ha) required for industrial cropping to feed remainder of population (i.e., in addition to UA detailed in Table 3).
Table 5.
Diesel fuel (L) needed for near-urban industrial agricultural machinery (ha of canola to supply it as biodiesel)*.
Fig 3.
Land required for food security for a median-sized city.
The figure visually depicts the food security land area footprint of the city. Circles illustrate relative scale of land available for micro-, and meso-urban agriculture (UA) and the population this land area could feed. Also represented is the additional land area of near-urban industrial cropping (including the required biofuel feedstock production), that could ensure food security (dietary energy and protein) for the population of a median-sized city (in this case Palmerston North, New Zealand).