Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change - weADAPT

IntroductionGlobally, and in Australia, cities are growing. Demonstrating this, built-up areas in theworld cover an estimated 4.75 million km 2 , and the spread of urban areas is growing ata rate of approximately 2040,000 km 2 each year. In Australia, three quarters of thepopulation live in major cities (defined by the Commonwealth Government’s MajorCities Unit as settlements of at least 100,000 people). According to Davis (2005), thisrapid urban growth signifies a new epoch for the planet; for the first time in history,more people live in cities than rural areas. This poses significant challenges andopportunities for ensuring national and international food security, and suchcircumstances are exacerbated in the context of climate change.According to renowned food writer Julian Cribb urban expansion is occurring almostentirely on the world’s best farmland. However, he also notes that it is not only citiesthat consume farmland, but the ‘pleasant but nutritionally unproductive’ recreationalpursuits such as golf courses and theme parks enjoyed by city dwellers in peri-urbanareas (Cribb, 2008, p. 58). Australia’s urbanization is also associated with growingdependence on centralized or integrated infrastructure to deliver power, water andwaste management services and on increasingly complex distribution networks,although there is increasing recognition of the merits of decentralised systems (e.g.Cook et al., 2009).While cities grow and expand their footprint, they are also inextricably linked to climatechange, both as the generators of significant proportions of greenhouse gas emissionsand as places substantially impacted by current and future changes to climates. Thecapacity of cities to secure the range of resources, including food, necessary for theircontinued existence in the face of significant climate change remains the subject ofextensive research and policy debate (e.g. Australian Government, 2010).In this review, we critically examine the intersections between Australia’s growingurbanisation, the need to respond to climate change and the prospects of andchallenges for ensuring greater food security.Historically, towns and cities have been places that have offered greater security(including food security) and opportunity than other places, which have typically beenmuch smaller settlements in rural areas. Security and opportunity are products,primarily, of scale and density. Larger numbers of people, living closer together found iteasier to defend themselves against external threats and also to provide each otherwith individual and social services. Recent work by Glaeser (2011) and Saunders(2010) and others has highlighted the contemporary benefits of cities and urban life,especially to migrants from rural areas. Urban scale and density also, perhapsparadoxically, provide opportunities for processes of radical social and political changeas well as for security and continuity. It is no coincidence that the various uprisings ofthe so-called Arab Spring have occurred in the cities of Egypt, Libya, Syria and Tunisia.But cities also, and at the same time, create threats to individual and social security:diseases can spread more rapidly in densely populated areas; natural and humanmadedisasters can have more devastating effects in such areas, and urbanpopulations become more dependent on broad scale systems of production,distribution and consumption. Rural populations are not necessarily any less vulnerableoverall to disease and disaster than urban populations, but the nature and scale of theirvulnerability is often profoundly different.Urban populations derive their relative security and opportunity from more extensiveand complex social and urban systems, but at the same time these can be sources ofvulnerability. Food security is a case in point. The relationship between food productionand urbanisation is both profound and long standing and as Mumford (1961) observed,the foundations of urbanism lie in Neolithic period when the domestication of plants andUrban food security, urban resilience and climate change 73