Periodic Reporting for period 4 - URBAG (Integrated System Analysis of Urban Vegetation and Agriculture)
Período documentado: 2024-03-01 hasta 2025-08-31
Urban areas face critical challenges driven by accelerating climate change, increased air pollution, and more frequent and intense extreme heat events. Green infrastructures such as urban agriculture, greenhouse rooftops, parks, gardens and urban forests can potentially make cities more resilient to climate change and more sustainable in terms of water management, food production, air quality, human well-being and biodiversity. The objective of the ERC Consolidator project URBAG is to find out how urban green infrastructures can be most efficient in contributing to urban sustainability by evaluating which combinations of urban, peri-urban agriculture and green spaces result in the best performance in terms of local and global environmental impact. URBAG provides the evidence-based knowledge needed to shift urban planning from fragmented fixes to integrated, adaptive, and multifunctional green infrastructure solutions that safeguard public well-being and ecological integrity.
The project has developed novel and comprehensive analysis to integrate the life cycle impacts of the resources required for green infrastructures with the understanding of how green infrastructures impact the urban land-atmosphere interaction. This multidisciplinary analysis of green infrastructures is timely and urgent as various cities are currently implementing green infrastructures in various forms despite there being very little quantitative knowledge as to which infrastructure strategies are most effective in promoting food production, air quality and temperature comfort while reducing environmental impact and protecting social vulnerabilities.
The investigation, connecting processes between the natural, the socio-institutional, and the built environment developed a novel, comprehensive analytical framework with three specific aims:
1. System Integration: Move beyond planning silos by integrating environmental impacts (via Life Cycle Assessment), urban resource use (optimizing the food-energy-water nexus), and atmospheric interactions (air quality and temperature regulation).
2. Multiscale Assessment: Identify GI combinations that maximize urban benefits while minimizing negative impacts, assessed at both the local scale (e.g. reducing neighborhood heat stress) and the broader scale (e.g. global climate impact of material sourcing).
3. Actionable Guidance: Provide municipal planners and policymakers with validated tools and evidence-based recommendations to design sustainable GI strategies and avoid unintended consequences, culminating in the "Green Infrastructures - A Guide for city planners and policy makers."
The project has developed novel and comprehensive analysis to integrate the life cycle impacts of the resources required for green infrastructures with the understanding of how green infrastructures impact the urban land-atmosphere interaction. This multidisciplinary analysis of green infrastructures is timely and urgent as various cities are currently implementing green infrastructures in various forms despite there being very little quantitative knowledge as to which infrastructure strategies are most effective in promoting food production, air quality and temperature comfort while reducing environmental impact and protecting social vulnerabilities.
The investigation, connecting processes between the natural, the socio-institutional, and the built environment developed a novel, comprehensive analytical framework with three specific aims:
1. System Integration: Move beyond planning silos by integrating environmental impacts (via Life Cycle Assessment), urban resource use (optimizing the food-energy-water nexus), and atmospheric interactions (air quality and temperature regulation).
2. Multiscale Assessment: Identify GI combinations that maximize urban benefits while minimizing negative impacts, assessed at both the local scale (e.g. reducing neighborhood heat stress) and the broader scale (e.g. global climate impact of material sourcing).
3. Actionable Guidance: Provide municipal planners and policymakers with validated tools and evidence-based recommendations to design sustainable GI strategies and avoid unintended consequences, culminating in the "Green Infrastructures - A Guide for city planners and policy makers."
Some main results of this multidisciplinary effort to evaluate green infrastructures are:
1) The development of a framework for quantifying food-water-energy interactions for urban and peri-urban agriculture. This was operationalized through the URBAG LCA Tool, a novel Python-based application enabling the calculation of regionalized Life Cycle impacts allowing planners to accurately model the required water resources and their associated impacts, thereby providing a robust basis for optimizing resource flows within the urban food system.
2) Advancement of urban atmosphere simulations through the improvement of atmospheric models to determine air quality, temperature regulation, and the urban carbon footprint. By employing a novel, spatially-explicit methodological framework, the project quantified how different GI strategies, such as green roofs and urban agriculture, affect local heat stress and air pollution in dense urban settings.
3) The "Green Infrastructures - A Guide for city planners and policy makers," to provide cities with strategies are that are most effective for promoting essential benefits like food production, air quality, and urban cooling while minimizing local and global impact, including urban vulnerabilities. The Guide is synthesized from the main results of more than 20 peer-reviewed scientific articles, providing planners with validated, evidence-based tools and recommendations necessary to create truly sustainable GI strategies and deliver widespread social benefits.
1) The development of a framework for quantifying food-water-energy interactions for urban and peri-urban agriculture. This was operationalized through the URBAG LCA Tool, a novel Python-based application enabling the calculation of regionalized Life Cycle impacts allowing planners to accurately model the required water resources and their associated impacts, thereby providing a robust basis for optimizing resource flows within the urban food system.
2) Advancement of urban atmosphere simulations through the improvement of atmospheric models to determine air quality, temperature regulation, and the urban carbon footprint. By employing a novel, spatially-explicit methodological framework, the project quantified how different GI strategies, such as green roofs and urban agriculture, affect local heat stress and air pollution in dense urban settings.
3) The "Green Infrastructures - A Guide for city planners and policy makers," to provide cities with strategies are that are most effective for promoting essential benefits like food production, air quality, and urban cooling while minimizing local and global impact, including urban vulnerabilities. The Guide is synthesized from the main results of more than 20 peer-reviewed scientific articles, providing planners with validated, evidence-based tools and recommendations necessary to create truly sustainable GI strategies and deliver widespread social benefits.
The URBAG project represents significant progress beyond the state of the art by fundamentally shifting the approach to urban sustainability research and planning. Traditionally, studies have assessed green infrastructures (GI) in isolated silos (e.g. focusing only on hydrology or social benefits). URBAG overcame this fragmentation by introducing a novel, integrated framework based on Social-Ecological-Technological Systems (SETS) and Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA). This interdisciplinary approach allows for the first time a spatially-explicit assessment of the joint effects, synergies, and critical trade-offs of GI combinations across all domains, including the complex food-energy-water nexus. Furthermore, the project advanced evaluation by rigorously assessing impacts across multiple scales—connecting local benefits (e.g. heat reduction) with broader-scale environmental costs (via LCA and planetary boundaries)—a crucial step that moves planning beyond simple maximization of green space to optimization for true, holistic sustainability and social equity