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Comparing the carbon footprints of urban and conventional agriculture

Nature Cities volume 1, pages 164–173 (2024)Cite this article

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An Author Correction to this article was published on 21 March 2024

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Abstract

Urban agriculture (UA) is a widely proposed strategy to make cities and urban food systems more sustainable. Until now, we have lacked a comprehensive assessment of the environmental performance of UA relative to conventional agriculture, and results from earlier studies have been mixed. This is the first large-scale study to resolve this uncertainty across cities and types of UA, employing citizen science at 73 UA sites in Europe and the United States to compare UA products to food from conventional farms. Results reveal that the carbon footprint of food from UA is six times greater than conventional agriculture (420 gCO2e versus 70 gCO2e per serving). However, some UA crops (for example, tomatoes) and sites (for example, 25% of individually managed gardens) outperform conventional agriculture. These exceptions suggest that UA practitioners can reduce their climate impacts by cultivating crops that are typically greenhouse-grown or air-freighted, maintaining UA sites for many years, and leveraging circularity (waste as inputs).

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Fig. 1: The carbon footprint of conventional versus urban agriculture.
Fig. 2: GHG emissions by farm type and product.
Fig. 3: Infrastructure and carbon footprints at urban agriculture sites.

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Data availability

All data used for this study are available in the Supplementary Information. See the attached Supplementary Information for more details and data. Public datasets, including FPED, FICRCD and FNDDS, are available for download online via their citations. EcoInvent data used for lifecycle impact assessment are proprietary and may be accessed via purchase.

Code availability

All code used for this study is available in the Supplementary Information.

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Acknowledgements

This work was made possible by the enthusiasm, patience and support of the farmers and gardeners who became citizen scientists. We also want to thank our colleagues who contributed their time, energy and insight, including L. Roy, M. Israel and L. Jean-Soro, among others. This Article is based on the FEW-meter project, funded by the ESRC (UK, grant no. ES/S002170/2), BMBF (Germany, grant no. 01LF1801A), ANR (France, grant no. ANR-17-SUGI-0001-01), NSF (USA, Belmont Forum 18929627), the National Science Centre (Poland, grant no. 2017/25/Z/HS4/03048) and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (GA no. 730254) under the JPI Urban Europe’s call ‘SUGI FWE Nexus’.

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Jason K. Hawes, Benjamin P. Goldstein.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School for Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Jason K. Hawes, Benjamin P. Goldstein & Joshua P. Newell

  2. Department of Bioresource Engineering, McGill University, Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec, Canada

    Benjamin P. Goldstein

  3. University Paris-Saclay, INRAE-AgroParisTech, UMR SAD-APT, Palaiseau, France

    Erica Dorr, Baptiste Grard & Agnès Fargue-Lelièvre

  4. School of Architecture and Planning, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

    Silvio Caputo & Victoria Schoen

  5. ILS Research, Dortmund, Germany

    Runrid Fox-Kämper & Kathrin Specht

  6. Agroecology and Environment Research Unit, ISARA, Lyon, France

    Baptiste Grard

  7. CUNY Urban Food Policy Institute, CUNY Graduate School of Public Health & Health Policy, The City University of New York, New York, NY, USA

    Rositsa T. Ilieva

  8. Faculty of Human Geography and Planning, Department of Integrated Geography, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland

    Lidia Poniży

  9. Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy, The City University of New York, New York, NY, USA

    Nevin Cohen

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Contributions

J.K.H. and B.P.G. provided conceptualization, methodology, formal analysis, data curation, contributed to writing the original draft, provided review and editing, and validation. J.P.N. provided conceptualization, resources, contributed to writing the original draft, provided review and editing, supervision, funding acquisition and project administration. E.D. provided conceptualization, methodology, investigation, data curation, contributed to writing the original draft, and provided review and editing. S.C. provided conceptualization, investigation, resources and review and editing. R.F.-K. provided conceptualization, investigation, resources and review and editing. B.G. provided conceptualization, investigation and review and editing. R.T.I. provided conceptualization, investigation and review and editing. A.F.-L. provided conceptualization, investigation, resources and review and editing. L.P. provided conceptualization, investigation, resources, review and editing, and project administration. V.S. provided conceptualization, investigation and review and editing. K.S. provided conceptualization, investigation, resources, review and editing. N.C. provided conceptualization, investigation, resources and review and editing.

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Correspondence to Jason K. Hawes.

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Hawes, J.K., Goldstein, B.P., Newell, J.P. et al. Comparing the carbon footprints of urban and conventional agriculture. Nat Cities 1, 164–173 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-023-00023-3

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