Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: JUST GROW: Co-designing justice-centric indicators and governance principles to intensify urban agriculture sustainably and equitably

This award provides support to U.S. researchers participating in a project competitively selected by a 55-country initiative on global change research through the Belmont Forum. The Belmont Forum is a consortium of research funding organizations focused on support for transdisciplinary approaches to global environmental change challenges and opportunities.

It aims to accelerate delivery of the international research most urgently needed to remove critical barriers to sustainability by aligning and mobilizing international resources. Each partner country provides funding for their researchers within a consortium to alleviate the need for funds to cross international borders. This approach facilitates effective leveraging of national resources to support excellent research on topics of global relevance best tackled through a multinational approach, recognizing that global challenges need global solutions.

This award provides support for the U.S. researchers to cooperate in consortia that consist of partners from at least three of the participating countries. The teams will develop and employ new transdisciplinary approaches to address sustainable consumption and production as a socio-technical system to help inform decision-making for sustainable, resilient, and just systems of consumption and production.

The project focuses on the role that city regions and urban agriculture can play in sustainably intensifying agricultural production to meet global food needs in the 21st century. Greater investment in localizing city region food systems—combining food production in cities and their peri-urban landscapes—promises to shorten supply chains and reconnect producers with consumers, improving socio-ecological sustainability and resilience.

Sustainable urban agricultural intensification is likely to entail greater use of technologies that decouple food production from environmental constraints including seasonal climates and available land base. Proposed technological systems range from capital-intensive approaches such as vertical farms, which fully control the growing environment, to more knowledge-intensive approaches such as urban agroecology that balance environmental modification with crop diversity and agronomic adaptation.

While knowledge of the relative resource requirements, environmental footprints, and productivity of these production systems in terms of energy and land-use intensity, life cycle impacts, and yield are being investigated, this study will focus on comparatively evaluating the equity and justice implications of different pathways toward a sustainable city-region food system.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.