Urban food security, urban resilience and climate change - weADAPT

ecome more acute in the future. Already population and development pressuresin coastal peri-urban areas have resulted in the loss of arable land to housingand industry. The coastal peri-urban zone is predicted to become increasinglyvaluable as rainfall patterns retreat to the coast. As coastal cities expand intoproductive and arable areas, viable block sizes for potential horticulturalproduction are reduced to high value parcels of land for housing. As developmentproceeds, neighbouring viable and productive parcels of land come underincreasing pressure to cease traditional farming methods (p. 29).These conclusions are echoed by de Zeeuw & Dubbeling (2009) in their review ofglobal trends. They suggest that because of their high dependency on food boughtrather than food grown by themselves, urban consumers are likely to becomeincreasingly vulnerable to a number of global threats. And, of course, the urban poorwill be most exposed and vulnerable to these new threats:Inevitably, the effects of climate change will hit hardest on the urban poor, sincethey are often located in the most vulnerable parts of the cities and have thelowest capacity to adapt to such changes (de Zeeuw & Dubbeling, 2009, p. 5).However, rural populations will not be unaffected:City economies will suffer as agricultural production in the surroundingcountryside is hit by storms, floods or water scarcity. The decline in agriculturalproductivity will thus not only effect the rural population but also the urban poor(de Zeeuw & Dubbeling, 2009, p. 10).Gregory et al.(2005) usefully broaden their consideration of security from apreoccupation with food availability to issues of access and utilisation, or what is oftenreferred to as a ‘food systems’ approach:Much climatic change/agricultural research has been focussed on assessing thesensitivity of various attributes of crop systems land suitability, crop yields, pestregimes) to specified changes in climate. These partial assessments most oftenconsider climate change in isolation, focus on bio-physical aspects of production,and provide little insight into the food accessibility and food utilisation dimensionsof food security. (Gregory et al., 2005 p. 2143)Instead they propose a concern also with the capacity of other systems to cope withnew threats and challenges,and:The vulnerability of food systems is not determined by the nature and magnitudeof environmental stress per se, but by the combination of the societal capacity tocope with, and/or recover from environmental change, coupled with the degree ofexposure to stress. (Gregory et al., 2005, p. 2143)… climate change is only one of several changes affecting food systems and thatits relative importance varies both between regions and between different societalgroups within a region. Adaptations of food systems via interventions inavailability, access and utilisation are possible to cope with climate change atdifferent scales although their feedbacks to the earth system have yet to be fullyassessed (Gregory et al., 2005, p. 2147)Overall, there is a tendency in some of the literature to make broad statements aboutthe likely impacts of climate change on food security in general and perhaps even onUrban food security, urban resilience and climate change 82