Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change - weADAPT

Interviewees offered numerous innovative ideas for how these barriers might beovercome. Some mentioned the model of the Agricultural Land Reserve in Vancouveras a successful example of the protection of prime peri-urban farmland from thepressures of urban sprawl. The Bunyip Food Belt project is a multi-institutionalconsortium aiming to expand water infrastructure to the peri-urban market gardens inMelbourne’s south-east borders, with the aim of increasing food production andcreating the basis for value-adding and local economic development. The CERESEnvironmental Education Park in Brunswick is piloting a model of bio-intensive city foodproduction, centred around small-scale aquaponics infrastructure, and in partnershipwith schools, as a way of making urban farming financially viable and thereby attractingyoung, capable and enthusiastic people into the industry. Aquaponics and hydroponicswere also held up as models of climate-ready urban and peri-urban food production,given their minimal consumption of water compared to conventional agriculture, theircapacity to control external factors such as temperature and extreme weather eventsand their comparatively high levels of productivity. In the Gold Coast, the use offormerly derelict land by Permaculture Gold Coast to grow food, produce high qualitycompost using waste supplied by the City Council and to use their facilities to runhighly effective job training schemes, point also to the potential of multi-faceted localinitiatives focussed on food production.5.4 Future possibilitiesAs many submissions made in response to the National Food Plan issues paper(Australian Government, 2011b) make clear, so long as Australia is presented as afood secure country it can be difficult to promote measures to make Australian citiesmore food secure. While there is some recognition and acknowledgement that certaingroups in Australian society are experiencing and indeed suffering from food insecurity,there is little recognition that Australian cities depend for their food on supply lines thatare clearly vulnerable to disruption by local extreme weather events as well as byglobal economic and geo-political factors.Planning for so-called ‘natural disasters’ may address some of the problems of supply,but there is very little recognition or acknowledgement at Federal and State level thaturban food security might be improved through the development of more localised foodsystems for urban or metropolitan areas. Some local authorities have made moreprogress on this front, but their capacity to support extensive action within their ownjurisdictions let alone coordinate their actions with others, is limited.The UK government’s Chief Scientific Advisor, Sir John Beddington referred recently to‘the perfect storm’ facing conventional food and farming policies and in the report of theCommission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change described how businessas usual would not bring food security or environmental sustainability (Beddington,2011). In response, Porritt (2009) has proposed four principles that should underpinany necessarily radical new approach to improving food security. The first is termedresolarisation and refers to a systematic reduction in our dependence on stored solarenergy or fossil fuels (including to fix nitrogen in our soil) and greater use of real-timesolar energy as a fuel and, through the planting of legumes, to fix soil nitrogen. Thesecond is relocalisation, which refers to the attempt to reduce the length of food supplychains, rather than achieving total self-sufficiency in production and consumption withinUrban food security, urban resilience and climate change 64