Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change - weADAPT

a stronger focus on addressing the factors that underlie food security, such ashealthy urban planning, and access to employment, affordable housing andplanning.Furthermore, a number of the participating councils were also incorporating, for the firsttime, food supply and food security issues into their Municipal Strategic Statements. Inaddition, food security and related issues had been incorporated by 2010, into 21 plansacross community services divisions in the various councils, and in 20 plans developedin infrastructure divisions.There has been less concerted action around local or municipal food security inQueensland where, again, agriculture is seen primarily as a rural activity, albeit one ofthe ‘four pillars’ of the state’s economy identified by the Newman government. There islittle evidence that food security is seen as a pressing issue facing cities within thestate, although there has been (until recently) some policy attention given to thepotential for greater food production in urban and peri-urban settings.Gold Coast City Council did, however, identify local food production as an importantelement in its climate change adaptation strategy and commissioned a scoping study oflocal food production and purchase (GCCC, 2011). This included urban food security ina more holistic manner and recognises the environmental, economic and socialbenefits of developing a more integrated and extensive local food system.On the Gold Coast, food security has been explored at the individual level, with anincreased emphasis on food production and sharing initiatives:Food security is not having to go down to the shop and buy your own. It's aboutgrowing your own, and so in terms of food security for people it cuts down onfood miles and that's a good thing. But it's really not generating much in the wayof people's food security, if they come here and buy stuff all the time. We've gotpeople who come here and they've looked at us and again some of theunemployed people, like that guy I was just talking about who’s now employedfull-time. He lives in a boarding house and he's got this massive food garden inthe back of a boarding house and so he's cooking with gas. Another guy, an artistwho paints our beehives – we've got two artists – and he's all fired up and he'staken water weed and you name it home to build his own garden. I guess it'sgood in a way here that it provides security for people to have an alternative form,like an alternative production area for food so that if something goes wrongsomewhere else, then okay, there's always there's food here. They could comehere instead of going to the supermarket but yeah, I'd really like to see morepeople growing their own stuff [Market gardener and permaculturalist, GoldCoast].This notion of food resilience also resonates quite strongly with community andindividual urban agricultural practitioners interviewed during these case studies. Manyof these interviewees expressed their understanding of food security in terms of greaterlevels of individual and community self-sufficiency. They talked about ‘people growingtheir own food’; and activities such as food sharing and food swaps (mainly of producegrown in backyards), seed sharing, and plant exchanges. Angelo Eliades, whoseUrban food security, urban resilience and climate change 33