Urban Horticulture: Reducing Food Miles to Improve Cities Microclimate and Environmental Sustainability

Abstract

Human population growth rates determine future population and cities sizes. By gathering together people and production, cities also concentrate the demand for fresh water and other natural resources, food included. In addition, because the urban sprawl has destroyed agricultural land, it is necessary to move some of the production from rural to urban areas. This means that it is necessary to re-think our cities, our productive cities. In this dissertation are explored major strategies for contributing to the challenge of feeding people in urban areas. Particular emphasis is placed on local low-input cultivation systems. The environmental profile of different food supply chains, based on different ‘food miles’, was assessed. ‘Food miles’, first coined in ‘90s, measure the distance that food travels from where it is grown or raised to where it is consumed. The selected methodology to assess the environmental impact was the life cycle assessment (LCA). The impact category chosen was the global warming potential (GWP), through midpoint methods, the IPCC 2013 100a. It contains the climate change factors of IPCC in a time-frame of 100 years; it is expressed in Kg CO2 eq. Nevertheless it was also used to evaluate the urban garden’s climate mitigation using ENVI-met software and the predicted mean vote indicator. Here, it was confirmed the important value of gardens and horticultural activities in urban contexts. That, because there is an environmental improvement and the generation of ecosystem services.