Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change - weADAPT

half-desert environments. We’re growing sugar cane, which uses massivequantities of water, in really dry areas. These growers are getting subsidisedwater: cotton is terrible, sugar-cane is worse [in terms of water usage]. We’re alsogrowing semi-aquatic rice, in the driest parts of Australia…There has been a lotof complaints by gardening groups, and calls for the government to give people inurban environments incentives to grow their own food, by giving them water atthe same rate that the farmers get it. We’re being charged a fortune for waterhere, but the irony is that 80% of all water usage is in [commercial] agriculture.Eight per cent is in urban environments, twelve per cent is industry. So whilepeople are putting their toilets on half-flush and things like that, if you were tonuke all the urban centres and populations of Australia, you would only saveyourself eight per cent of the water, which is really quite insignificant in the largerscale of things [Backyard gardener and permaculturalist, Melbourne].Climate change is however seen not only as a concern but also as an opportunity. Forexample, one of the commercial farmers we spoke with specialising in hydroponicproduction saw their business as being significantly impacted by climate change, butin a positive way:With the igloos, we can control the temperature… So next year, we do want theheavy rain, we do want the crazy weather, because we know that the otherfarmers who use the traditional growing methods will struggle with that, and wewon’t. So climate changes actually work in our favour, the bad weather outsidewill cause production difficulties for other producers [but not for us]. For us,climate change is a market opportunity [Hydroponic market gardener,Melbourne].Similarly, but on a different scale, climate change did not seem to be a cause for fear inQueensland. A micro farmer on the Gold Coast suggested that small scale, diverse andlocal production might hold the key to food production under climate change scenarios,especially through the application of organic growing methods. This micro farmerexplained that climate change was unlikely to affect his crops because of his emphasison organic gardening techniques:I think more along the lines of what we're doing here is not [destructive], it's moreregenerative than taking out of the system....We make all our own soils. It's thesoils that are the focus. Okay we use a fair bit of water I suppose, but the wateruse, because of the way we make the beds, the beds hold moisture really, reallywell and we're having a lot of organic matter in beds. We plant so that by the timethe plants get up basically the whole bed's covered anyway. If you look at thosebeds out there, most of them are pretty close together and the soils not reallyexposed at all, so from a moisture perspective and from a rain perspective,climate change will not affect us [micro-farmer, Gold Coast].A founding member of Gold Coast Permaculture, explained that even if climate changeaffected his micro-farm, if there is a de-centralised system of small scale micro farmsacross the region, climate change would not be a problem:This sort of stuff here [Gold Coast Permaculture] addresses a lot of climatechange issues. But there is just no way that we can live long like this, and there isnothing we can do to come back from the point that we are at. It does not meanUrban food security, urban resilience and climate change 130