Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change - weADAPT

Review methodsThis stage of the research consists of a review of contemporary scholarly and policyliterature that focuses on food security, urban agriculture and urban resilience. It isconcerned also with the actual and anticipated impacts of climate change on theseelements and with the potential to improve policy and practice in the future.The review also reflects themes that were explored in field work conducted inMelbourne and the Gold Coast, including interviews with a wide range of local policymakers and practitioners in which issues emerging from the literature were explored ingreater detail and with a local focus.While literature reviews have been a standard feature of scholarly research for manyyears, in the last two decades there has been pronounced improvement in the rigourwith which many have been undertaken. The rise of the so-called evidence-basedpolicy movement saw increasing attention paid to the quality of evidence brought tobear in policy debates and to the more systematic synthesis of all relevant andavailable evidence in a given field. The approaches developed by the CochraneCollaboration (in the field of health care) and its sibling, the Campbell Collaboration (inthe broad field of social policy) provide a robust framework for identifying the bestavailable research on a given topic, and synthesising the results into a format mostuseful to policy development and evaluation. The rigorous criteria applied to theconduct of Campbell Reviews of social policy issues and interventions provide abenchmark for this review, but given a number of limitations on the time and resourcesavailable to us we were not able to meet all of the Campbell review criteria.Nevertheless, we have incorporated as many of their principles as possible in thisreview.The focus of our review was on the nature (and definitions) of urban food security andurban agriculture, historical patterns of urban agriculture in Australian cities andelsewhere, the anticipated and actual impacts of climate change on urban agriculturalpractices and factors that might inhibit or promote more extensive urban agriculturalpractices in the future.We limited our review to material published in English, since 1990, in academic andpolicy or practitioner journals and excluded material published in the popular media.We also focussed primarily on studies of cities in Australia and other developedcountries, although some definitional material based on countries of the global southwas included. While studies were not screened for research design or methodology,the majority could be described as narrative or conceptual rather than empirical studiesbased on any form of experimental design. Nevertheless, a small but significantnumber of empirical case studies now exist and have been included, and these appearto be a growing in the totality of studies of urban food security. Given the paucity ofempirical studies, no attempt was made to combine data sets and carry out any form ofmeta-analysis of larger data sets.A long list of material conforming to these broad criteria on the basis of title andabstract was then reviewed for relevance and a shorter list constructed. This materialwas then allocated (non-exclusively) to seven thematic groups for more detailedanalysis. The approach, findings and conclusions were then summarised and finallyincorporated into this draft review. Not all of the material listed in the consolidatedbibliography is referred to directly in the review.We will continue to add to the database of relevant material and to adjust our ownconclusions accordingly, until the end of this project. We also welcome suggestions ofany other relevant material that has not been included in the review.Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change 75