Urban Agriculture and Food Security in the Age of Climate Change
[Music]
i’m here today to talk to you about
urban agriculture
in and food insecurity in the age of
climate change
to me this is a very important topic
because
food agriculture is how we live as
people
every day we eat food every day we need
food
but climate change agriculture
the way it traditionally is by seasons
where there’s rain
um that’s you know pretty much
predictable
uh good soil and sunlight
these are factors that are very
important for food production
but are not guaranteed in the age of
climate change because of these
variations in temperature
rain coming too soon too much
which can cause flooding or drought from
not having enough rain
too much heat too much coal all these
factors are making
agriculture less stable and secure
but i believe that urban agriculture is
is a good alternative and so what i want
to do is to spend some time today
talking to you about these alternatives
because really what we’re looking for
is food security we need to secure our
food
supply and with billions of people on
the earth
and continue to grow we have to have
some alternatives
so in dressing future challenges i have
some urban black solutions that i’d like
to
to talk to you about i will talk a
little bit about urban agriculture
community gardens rooftop gardens school
gardens
controlled environment agriculture
vertical farms
green walls and ecological cities
so why urban based solutions well if you
look at this chart here you can see that
this is look showing the total
population
on the earth and how much is urban and
how much is rural
using percentages and as you can see
from the bar graph here
the light brown is urban
percentage and the darker brown
is rural and if you look at the 1950s
you can see that
30 percent of the world’s population
lived in urban
environments but 70 in rural but over
time
we can see each decade there’s a decline
more people move into the cities
from the rural environments of course
that’s making the rural
population numbers go down and so it
seemed that around
2010 which was about saying well
pretty much a decade ago you can see
that there was a shift where
uh over 50 percent of the world’s
population
live in urban environments and less than
50 percent
was in rural now that we’re in 2020 the
bar graph is showing that’s
60 percent uh people live in cities and
it’s gone down to 40 there’s no bar
for 2030 but one could assume that that
trend will continue so here’s a
definition of urban agriculture
it’s the growing and processing and
distribution of food in non-food
plant tree crops and raising the
livestock directly for the urban market
while within
and in the fringe of urban areas
so another way of thinking of it is
civic agriculture
where the community gardens where people
can get together and grow food in their
own neighborhoods
this is a great thing for children
obviously to get a chance to see where
food comes from
not just from the supermarket but they
could actually grow it themselves
and so the one way for people to feel
like they have more control of their
food supply and feel more secure is to
grow their own food whether it’s
in their backyards or in the front yard
and you can also grow it in empty lots
and so forth
and so this is a way that we can look at
communities having a little more control
over what they eat
particularly if we talk about fresh
vegetables fruits and so forth
really what the issue is is about space
with traditional agriculture
you know we plan across fields on a
horizontal
and that takes up you know a lot of
space spacial area
but rooftop gardens is another space
where we can we can grow food as well
and as you can see from these pictures
there are for commercial use for private
residential use and many ways of doing
it
large scale small scale but when you’re
thinking about these alternatives you
need to look at space
as a way of creating yield
that’s higher food to school linkages is
another way of looking at food
through the lens of schools and
food education is important children
learning
at an early age where food comes from
and having some control that food supply
is an important aspect
of becoming good citizens but also
what i like to call is prosumers those
who
not that who produce as well not just
consume but you also
produce in your society
so as we say with climate change you
know the environment
is uh out in the natural world is
not something we can control but so much
seasonal changes are things that we have
to just deal with
and sometimes season’s seasonal change
works out well other times it can be
very destructive so that’s why
controlled environmental agriculture is
another
alternative way where you grow inside of
everybody’s seen greenhouses
so that concept of growing inside is
really important
geoponics is the groin with soil
and you have to have a rich soil to to
grow plants i mean in fact
plants need soil not dirt dirt is
is not alive but soil is alive it’s
alive with with microbes and bacterias
and
and worms and insects and all kinds of
little creatures
that are in there breaking down the soil
into nutrients and that’s what the
plants roots
use to to to grow and nourish itself and
then we in turn eat those plants
but you can also grow without soil
another alternative
is hydroponics and that’s water based
solutions where you have a nutrient
flow in water and and hydroponics is a
gradient way of um
creating more food through use of water
it’s a way of conserving the water
uh having the nutrients that flow and be
recycled
throughout the system plants grow faster
you can grow it inside protect it from
pests so it’s organic
and and vandalism and and so there are a
lot of advantages of course you need to
have the infrastructure
the pumps and the and the lighting and
all these things but once you make that
initial investment
then it’s about maintenance and you can
grow food
more often and larger volumes
aeroponics is another way of growing
food
using nutrients solution
but it’s it’s basically spraying the
roots of the plant
with sort of a nutrient mist and
that way you conserve water and and the
roots get bathed
but you don’t the roots don’t have to
really pull or leach
the nutrients like out of the soil it’s
sort of free-flowing
and they can just kind of pick it out
the air and it’s another way of growing
plants
much quicker and um and cleaner
aquaponics is mixing uh the growth of
plants and fish
together in somewhat of a artificial
ecosystem
and as you can see in these images here
fish can be grown and contained
and with that the baroponic system is a
system where
the fish the poop from the fish is
circulated
into the plants uh as nutrients
and in the plants uh roots sort of
filter out those nutrients
and put clean water back into the fish
tank
and so this is sort of a circular system
that
can be built uh you know and easily as
well
as you can see a lot of this is about
vertical farms
building upwards rather than just
outwards
you know uh as you can see that you know
with space
being going upwards we can we can put
more
plants uh in a room or even in a
building
as you can see in the image to the far
left here that the this high-rise
building it’s a it’s an artist’s
rendition it doesn’t
really exist right now but it could
exist
and kind of imagine that um instead of
seeing high-rise buildings where people
live
you know you can actually have buildings
where we’re growing food
plants flowers fruits
and can imagine the workforce living
there living in a building
where they tend to the food as uh and
then also
i think at the bottom that you can
imagine having
mini mall with boutiques and maybe
restaurant
maybe a marketplace where the food
that’s grown in the building is actually
being sold down on the first level
and you can also imagine this having
maybe
trucks going out to various
neighborhoods from this building
providing fresh fruit and healthy
vegetables to
local communities so it cuts down on the
carbon carbon dioxide from
emissions because instead of bringing
food in from far away
you have more of a local production
there
and it provides jobs for people in
various areas such as
engineers and botanists and plumbers and
sales people entrepreneurs it could be a
whole nother
economy also green walls
someone could think about green walls as
another helpful solution
to absorbing carbon out the atmosphere
rawls can be decorative but also is
functional to lower the heat
island effect bring the temperatures
down and cool
as well as provide oxygen and if you
wanted to
grow herbs and vegetables and lettuces
and so forth you could have smaller
versions of green walls
in your backyard and so please so once
again these are almost vertical farming
it’s
kind of going upwards on the side of
buildings we talked about beyond tops of
roof
and so all of these
are just the beginning of us thinking
about a notion of creating the
ecological city
or ecological cities it’s a term that’s
been around for a while but i think it’s
a term that we need to revisit
and move forward continue to talk about
how do we make
cities ecological meaning that they
their ecology is part of the whole
aspect of living in a city
and that part of that is food production
some of it can be done
in shipping containers as well
these are secure places where we could
grow food
using vertical farming if there’s
flooding or any reason to move these
containers you can move them to higher
ground you can move them to different
neighborhoods
they’re safe and secure buses there’s a
image of a bus there the interior where
some can even like
old school buses you can grow food in
there it could be a garden
bus or it could be
mobile farms where you could drive food
to various neighborhoods and and
serve vegetables like in a marketplace
out of a bus
so really what it comes down to
innovation if we want to deal with
climate change we need to think about
what are the ways that we can change our
cities
to be more environmentally balanced and
more ecological
and provide more food security the last
two images are
one of mazdar in the middle east
which was the ecological city where they
did focus on
building structures and vegetation and
transportation various ways to make the
city more
ecologically balanced the other last
image is once again an artist’s
rendition of a possible future
but i think this is a future that we
should look at as a division of a place
where we can grow food
for to continue to feed the masses of
people provide jobs and opportunity
to use alternative forms of energy such
as solar and wind
and secure our futures as humans on this
planet
so that’s all i have to say for now
i thank you for your time and interest
and look forward to
seeing you take some of these ideas to
heart
and helping us create a more sustainable
future thank you