Sustainable nutrition: a spatially explicit modeling approach for urban land use planning

Abstract

Rapid urbanization has influenced the transformation of local and global food systems, altering the availability, access to, and distribution of healthy food. Micronutrient deficiency and hunger have been exacerbated worldwide. Balancing social, economic, and environmental needs and demands is complex, and often presents tradeoffs between nutritional security and sustainable practices. While various frameworks have been developed to support policy and decision makers in prioritizing tradeoffs that impact urbanization and food production, they are not easily operationalized due to complexities of implementation stemming from the availability of data, place-specific nuances, and methodological difficulties, among others. There is a need to develop analytical approaches to enable researchers, planners, and policymakers to better understand the impact of land use choices on sustainable local food production. The foodshed approach can be a powerful tool to improve the sustainability of regional and local food systems. This research proposes a simulation strategy to evaluate the impact of agricultural land use and crop choices on nutritional production in rapidly growing urban areas. The application of this framework for decision-making is exemplified in the Toluca Metropolitan Zone, Mexico by showing how tradeoffs between macronutrient and micronutrient daily requirements could be explored under a variety of land use scenarios. This analytical framework can be used to understand options for providing nutritional security to the local population.