Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change - weADAPT

existing Council’s water testing facilities, where people could take their soil, compostand water samples for comprehensive testing.It's a big a problem for us is the science....It's prohibitive. So testing for pesticidesand stuff, what we usually do is I'll give a call to Biosecurity Queensland or theGold Coast City Council or we might ring you guys [University] and say, ‘Is thereany possibility of you guys doing that for us? This is what we're doing,’ and weset that sort of situation up. If the health and safety of the population [is to beconsidered] which is the first point of call for us, then they have to have a rigoroustesting standard and they have to do that. So it's probably going to be more costeffectivefor them to employ someone in council that's qualified to do all of that,because the wastewater treatment guys already do a lot of this stuff anyway. Soit's probably going to be more cost-effective for them to just put someone in thereand say, ‘That's the go to sort of person that will test the compost and test thisand test that,’ and then it becomes a really streamlined, clean system as well[Micro farmer, Gold Coast].At the same time, it was suggested that research should be carried out on the bestways to remediate contaminated land, and on what plants are safe to grow and eat,following different levels and types of contamination. Some individual gardenersreported that fruiting trees are much less likely to take up contaminants in the soil andpass them through to the edible parts of plants, than are leafy green vegetables.Consequently, a possible response would be to promote plants that do not take up soilcontaminants, recognising that such a promotional campaign would require expertscientific input on appropriate species from the outset. Furthermore, local governmentscould facilitate through grants, resource sharing and knowledge, the use of alternativegrowing mediums such as raised beds, planter boxes and straw bale systems.Land use invariably become a major talking point when urban agriculture wasdiscussed, because of the lack of land available for urban agriculture, or the use ofpublic owned land for community gardening, or because of potential nuisanceassociated with keeping animals. In terms of opposition to the further expansion ofcommunity gardening, the food forest model appeared to offer a potential way forward.The advantage of a food forest over traditional allotment-style community gardens isthat because they consist of trees, they do not prevent other activities, such as dogwalkingand picnicking from taking place in the same vicinity. The model has yet to betested on any significant scale, although a proposal is currently being negotiated withDarebin Council in Melbourne to create a food forest in a section of All Nations Park.On the Gold Coast, numerous grassed, underutilized parks exist within the city, and aproportion of them could, in principle, be devoted to food forest experiments.As an alternative to the perceived lack of urban land and the fear of losing public parksto food growing activities and enterprises, the innovative way in which Gold CoastPermaculture currently grows food and runs a successful micro-business – through thetemporary leasing of private land offers a model for other urban food growers. In mostAustralian cities, many opportunities exist for non-permanent food productionenterprises to take over land on a temporary basis:Developers are sitting on just thousands of hectares of space everywhere aroundAustralia and there's really no reason why a lot of that land can't be given over togroups to grow food. We could replicate this place half a dozen times down theUrban food security, urban resilience and climate change 145