H2020 PROTEAN Project: Prospective Environmental Assessment of Emerging Urban Agriculture Systems

The Contribution of Urban Agriculture to Environmental Sustainability A time-explicit environmental impact assessment clarifies the significant role of urban agriculture in future food supply. Urban agriculture consists of the cultivation, processing, and distribution of food in or around urban areas. It includes a complex and diverse combination of food production, such as vertical farming and green roofs. Compared to more traditional agricultural systems in terms of energy and water consumption, it has emerged as a more sustainable alternative for food production. Quantifying the effective contribution of urban agriculture to the environmental sustainability of cities requires the ability to both assess its future environmental impacts and compare them with those of traditional agriculture in the same context.

In line with this need, the EU-funded PROTEAN project, supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) programme, set out to develop prospective life-cycle databases to estimate the future impacts of food production. “In this way, PROTEAN will make it possible to compare food production through conventional and urban agriculture, all going forward,” explains MSCA Fellow Angélica Mendoza. Building Life-Cycle Databases At its core, PROTEAN sought to provide a systematic method for coupling two datasets for prospective life-cycle databases.

The first dataset came from internationally relevant models dedicated to calculating climate change scenarios under different socioeconomic trajectories, the so-called integrated assessment models.

The second dataset describes the life cycle of product systems, the so-called life cycle inventory (LCI) databases. “Coupling them makes it easier to calculate more robust prospective life cycle assessments (LCAs), as prospective LCI databases account for expected changes in major economic sectors in the future,” adds Mendoza. Key insights for urban planners and policymakers: “We first discovered that there was a huge societal need to quantify the future impacts of products, as we strive to manage the climate crisis and other situations that have pushed planetary boundaries,” confirms Mendoza. Furthermore, PROTEAN realized that few quantitative tools could provide such an assessment; from there, the importance of developing prospective LCI and LCA databases became clear. “We also learned that not only was the temporal dimension important, but the spatial dimension was also particularly important in the case of peri-urban agriculture,” adds Mendoza.

The geographic visualization of inventory flows and impacts plays an important role in understanding urban resilience, global sustainability, and the multifunctionality of urban agriculture as a nature-based solution. This is vital information for urban planners and policymakers. “Therefore, we ended up applying and further developing regionalized prospective LCA methodologies,” Mendoza confirms.

The added value of peri-urban agriculture PROTEAN focused on the applications of methodological development for the Barcelona metropolitan area. "We realized that primary data, i.e., field data, are scarce and dispersed, so we believe that, in the short and medium term, calibrating our models with primary data is essential to verify the conclusions," notes Mendoza. In the long term, the project aims to complete the assessment of the increase in peri-urban agricultural areas, as proposed by the Urban Development Plan for the metropolitan area. "We hope that in this spatio-temporal LCA we can understand the added value of peri-urban agriculture with respect to imported food and its role in the circularity of the city," concludes Mendoza.