The garden spillover: can urban agriculture change consumer environmental footprints?

Sustainable food system transformation requires engagement along the whole food chain.

Cities, as centres of food consumption and waste production, contribute to resource demand (e.g. phosphorus (P) fertilizers) and pollution (e.g. P induced eutrophication). Despite their collective purchasing and voting power, urban consumers remain difficult to engage in transformation.

Experiential learning has successfully altered rural farmer nutrient management and met other citizen educational goals. However, it has not been tested as an intervention to change food consumer behaviours related to P.

This project will test the hypothesis that training, in the context of urban agriculture as an experiential learning opportunity, can alter participant diet and waste management preferences and actions beyond the garden.

We will compute P footprints in 3 groups of Swedish consumers: the public, community gardeners, and community gardeners who undergo a training intervention on P sustainability.

The footprint accounts for P release to the environment through food production and waste management and thus links emissions to particular consumption patterns.

Using Linköping as I case study, we will monitor pre- and post- intervention footprints, and include regionally specific P management practices in gardens, farmers markets, and sanitation in the calculations. If successful, training with urban agriculture could be a leverage point to improve the management of many resources.