Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change - weADAPT

urban resilience. This inevitably calls for speculation, although we hope to haveprovided some evidence on which this speculation can be built.There appears to be a significant dislocation both in the academic literature and incontemporary policy discourses between two approaches to understanding foodsecurity. On the one hand, long established conceptions of food security frame theissue as a matter primarily of aggregate production in which relatively unfetteredmarket mechanisms can be relied upon to distribute food at all spatial scales in themost efficient and equitable manner. Absolute shortfalls in food production are to beaddressed by the development and application of new farming technologies, whilemore localised shortages are dealt with by the refinement of market mechanisms andby social programs targeted at populations and groups considered to have specialneeds. On the other hand, an emerging analysis and policy framework takes a morepolitical approach and focuses on the rights of individuals and communities todetermine their own food needs and to play a more prominent part in meeting themthrough the establishment of more localised food systems. For the sake of conveniencewe describe these approaches as traditional/macro and critical/micro respectively.5.2 Impacts of climate change on urban food securityThese two contrasting conceptions or approaches differ also in their stance on theimpact of climate change on food security. The traditional/macro perspective tends torespond to predicted climate changes by exploring new areas for food production andby promoting research and the development of new crop strains that can withstandgreater heat, less water, increased soil salinity and so on. There is also somerecognition that new farming and food growing methods might also need to adjust tofactors such as peak oil, financial sector instability and unpredictable fluctuations inworld food prices (DAFF, 2012). The critical/micro perspective tends to see climatechange as one of a number of serious threats to food security and indeed to globalised,market-based forms of economic, social and political organisation. The response fromthis perspective to all of these threats is typically to call for reductions in overallconsumption and for the more rigorous application of the principles of sustainabledevelopment in creating more localised systems of production, distribution andconsumption (Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance, 2012; Klein, 2011).Those who attempt to find common ground between these positions often struggle todo so successfully, while some who acknowledge the serious impacts of climatechange and who call for radical changes to current food systems fail to recognise theurban dimensions to this problem. The Report of Commission on SustainableAgriculture and Climate Change (Bennington et al., 2011) for example calls for ‘majorinterventions at local to global scales to transform current patterns of food production,distribution and consumption’ (p. 4) and recognises that ‘the threats posed by climatechange to food supplies and livelihoods are likely to be spatially variable’ (p. 4).However the report goes on to call for a ‘..widely shared appreciation of agriculture as amultifunctional enterprise that delivers nutritious food, rural development,environmental services and cultural heritage..’ (p. 8, emphasis added). Similarly, whileit calls the empowerment of smallholder farmers (p. 9) and advocates reductions infood waste loss (p. 11) there is little sense that these might be significant in urban asUrban food security, urban resilience and climate change 59