Urban agriculture (UA) is a widely proposed strategy to make cities and urban food systems more sustainable. However, its carbon footprint remains understudied. In fact, the few existing studies suggest that UA may be worse for the climate than conventional agriculture. This is the first large-scale study to resolve this uncertainty across cities and types of UA, employing citizen science at 73 UA sites in Europe and the United States to compare UA products to food from conventional farms. The results reveal that food from UA is six times as carbon intensive as conventional agriculture (420g vs 70g CO2 equivalent per serving). Some UA crops (e.g., tomatoes) and sites (e.g., 25% of individually-managed gardens), however, outperform conventional agriculture. These exceptions suggest that UA practitioners can reduce their climate impacts by cultivating crops that are typically greenhouse grown or air-freighted, maintaining UA sites for many years, and leveraging waste as inputs.This database contains the necessary reference material to trace the path of our analysis from raw garden data to carbon footprint and nutrient results. It also contains the final results of the analyses in various extended forms not available in the publication. For more information, see manuscript at link below.
(Introduction partially quoted from Hawes et al., 2023)
Citation to related publication:
Hawes, J. K., Goldstein, B. P., Newell, J. P., Dorr, E., Caputo, S., Fox-Kämper, R., Grard, B., Ilieva, R. T., Fargue-Lelièvre, A., Poniży, L., Schoen, V., Specht, K., & Cohen, N. (2024). Comparing the carbon footprints of urban and conventional agriculture. Nature Cities, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-023-00023-3
