Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change - weADAPT

Their review notes a significant increase in the number of community gardens in Perthin recent years (from 14 to 40) and attributes this to the support and encouragementoffered by a project, Growing Communities WA, which was supported financially by arange of partners including the City of Swan, the Town of Cambridge and Lotterywest.This time limited project directly supported a number of community gardens, providedadvice and other resources to others and carried out research on the extent andimpacts of gardens across the state. It is superseded by the WA Community GardenNetwork, which as well as providing limited ongoing support, is also working to attractthe resources necessary to provide more extensive and secure support in the future.This illustrates a perennial problem for those working to advance the cause and thepractice of urban agriculture: a lack of long term and secure funding. Of course this isnot the only sector that experiences this problem, indeed it is endemic to the voluntaryand community sector as a whole, but it suggests that without long term support fromone or more level of government practical initiatives will remain fragile and strategicplanning notable by its absence.These more general findings related to urban agriculture in Western Australia alsoappear to be mirrored in the Gold Coast, one of our fieldwork case study areas. In thelast 18 months, and in response to the problems in food supply and distribution as aconsequence of the Queensland floods of January 2011, the Gold Coast City Councilhas expressed growing interest in support for urban agriculture. Urban agriculture, it isincreasingly recognised, may help overcome some of the vulnerabilities associatedwith complex commodity chains and centralised distribution hubs. Specifically, the GoldCoast City Council has provided funding assistance to expand the number ofcommunity gardens and is planning a study of the yields possible from intensivelyfarmed urban plots. Yet despite this type of initiative, local growers cite a range ofproblems associated with the planning and regulation of community gardens, highcosts of insurance and other compliance requirements.More broadly, Morgan and Sonnino’s (2010) analysis of the London Food Strategy(LFS) demonstrates some of the other resource challenges associated with urbanagriculture. Here, and even in what is undeniably a world city and with the wholeheartedsupport of the Mayor of London, the resources committed to theimplementation of the LFS were substantially less than those required to realise itsobjectives.Lovell’s (2010) review of multi-functional urban agriculture in cities of the United Statesrecognises that:One of the greatest constraints on the widespread adoption of urban agricultureis the limited access to land for those who would like to grow food, and the lack ofsecure tenure on that land (p. 2511).She goes on to argue that publicly-owned open space offers an important opportunityto redress this constraint, but more importantly to ‘...integrate urban agriculture directlyinto the planning of green infrastructure in cities’ (p. 2511). This requires a number ofconsiderations, including:market connections;transportation systems;resource availability;waste disposal systems.Lovell argues also that for urban planners to be able to argue persuasively for greateremphasis on urban agriculture in their plans, further research evidence is needed todemonstrate the value of ecosystem services flowing from urban agricultural land uses.Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change 97