The Sustainability Hoofprint of Cities: A Spatial Model to Assess Transboundary Urban Consumption

城市的可持续发展足迹：评估跨境城市消费的空间模型

• 批准号: 1805085
• 负责人: Joshua Newell
• 金额: $ 31.3万
• 依托单位: Regents of the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2018
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2018-07-15 至 2022-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1805085&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Sustainability; Hoofprint; Cities; Spatial; Model

The United States population consumes more meat per capita than any country except for Australia and roughly 80% of this consumption occurs in U.S. cities. This meat is sourced from distant regions, which shields urban dwellers from the environmental and societal burdens associated with its production. Studies of urban metabolism have illuminated the aggregate impacts of material and energy stocks and flows, but such modeling lacks the spatial detail necessary to analyze transboundary flows ('teleconnections') or the specific drivers of urban demand. Cities (and society) lack the requisite knowledge and tools to mitigate impacts due to the consumption of products (including meat). This project addresses this gap by addressing three questions: 1) What are the environmental impacts associated with meat consumption in U.S. cities? 2) Where are key 'hotspots' along meat supply chains? 3) What population segments are driving the consumption? The project will develop a spatially-explicit life cycle assessment (LCA) approach to model and map the urban hoofprint of twenty U.S. cities.This model, MeatS2 (Meat Sustainable Supply-Chain), operates at two spatial scales: within the city (urban meat demand by demographic groups) and along the production supply chain (hotspots of environmental and social impact). The model will be applied to beef, pork, and chicken (the hoofprint) and considers five indicators: greenhouse gas emissions, water scarcity, land use, nutrient loading (nitrates and phosphates), and particulate matter (PM2.5). Complementing the twenty-city analysis will be in-depth hoof print modeling of Los Angeles. To build the MeatS2 model, the project team weds concepts and methods from industrial ecology and geography (esp. political ecology, GIS, and environmental justice). This will be a large-scale study of how and where urban meat consumption in U.S. cities drives environmental and social change. Results from the research may have the potential to fundamentally influence the field of urban sustainability, which has traditionally used the built environment as the primary measure of a city's sustainability. This study may also have a transformative impact on the current state of knowledge of the drivers of the urban environmental footprint. For example, numerous studies identify income-level as the primary determinant, but based on initial evidence, an hypothesis to be explored is that lower-income segments of the urban population actually have larger hoot prints than those in higher-income brackets. Although the empirical focus is on livestock, MeatS2 seeks to offer a robust, generalizable methodology to model other transboundary resource flows and consumption drivers of a city's metabolism. Through the coupling of LCA with geospatial tools (i.e. GIS) and underutilized datasets (e.g. supermarket scanner data), this work targets to significantly advance urban metabolism modeling and analysis. Over time, this interdisciplinary synthesis may lead to new (and unexpected) knowledge breakthroughs in both industrial ecology and geography. By comparing the environmental impacts of meat consumption with other key urban metabolic drivers (e.g. transportation and buildings) and by linking producers and consumers in meat supply chains across disparate geographies, this study intends to challenge and strengthen plans, strategies, and policies designed to foster urban sustainability. Project findings will reach broader society through Hoofprint, a public-facing, web-based geovisualization tool that allows users to interactively explore hoofprints, meatsheds, and meat justice dimensions within and across the twenty U.S. cities. To further democratize knowledge about meat and the profound role that consumption has on distal regions and peoples, the research team will curate and teach The Hoofprint of Cities, a multimedia sustainability case module designed to promote engaged participatory learning. This online case will be freely available for educators, students, stakeholders, and the general public.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

美国人的人均肉类消费量仅次于澳大利亚，是世界上人均肉类消费量最高的国家，其中大约80%的消费发生在美国城市。这些肉来自遥远的地区，这使城市居民免受与其生产相关的环境和社会负担。对城市代谢的研究已经阐明了物质和能源储存和流动的总体影响，但这种建模缺乏分析跨界流动（“远程连接”）或城市需求的具体驱动因素所需的空间细节。城市（和社会）缺乏必要的知识和工具来减轻产品消费（包括肉类）造成的影响。该项目通过解决三个问题来解决这一差距：1)美国城市中肉类消费对环境的影响是什么？2)肉类供应链上的关键“热点”在哪里？3)哪些人群在推动消费？该项目将开发一种空间明确的生命周期评估（LCA）方法，对20个美国城市的城市足迹进行建模和绘制。这个名为MeatS2（肉类可持续供应链）的模型在两个空间尺度上运行：城市内部（人口群体的城市肉类需求）和生产供应链（环境和社会影响热点）。该模型将应用于牛肉、猪肉和鸡肉（蹄印），并考虑五个指标：温室气体排放、水资源短缺、土地利用、养分负荷（硝酸盐和磷酸盐）和颗粒物（PM2.5）。作为对20个城市分析的补充，将对洛杉矶进行深入的蹄印建模。为了构建MeatS2模型，项目团队将工业生态学和地理学（特别是政治生态学、地理信息系统和环境正义）的概念和方法结合起来。这将是一项关于美国城市肉类消费如何以及在何处推动环境和社会变化的大规模研究。研究结果可能会从根本上影响城市可持续性领域，该领域传统上使用建筑环境作为城市可持续性的主要衡量标准。这项研究还可能对城市环境足迹驱动因素的现有知识状况产生变革性影响。例如，许多研究将收入水平确定为主要决定因素，但基于初步证据，一个有待探索的假设是，城市人口中低收入阶层实际上比高收入阶层的人有更大的脚印。虽然实证的重点是牲畜，但MeatS2试图提供一种强大的、可推广的方法来模拟城市新陈代谢的其他跨界资源流动和消费驱动因素。通过LCA与地理空间工具（如GIS）和未充分利用的数据集（如超市扫描仪数据）的耦合，本工作旨在显著推进城市代谢建模和分析。随着时间的推移，这种跨学科的综合可能会在工业生态学和地理学方面带来新的（和意想不到的）知识突破。通过比较肉类消费与其他主要城市代谢驱动因素（如交通和建筑）的环境影响，并将不同地域的肉类供应链中的生产者和消费者联系起来，本研究旨在挑战和加强旨在促进城市可持续性的计划、战略和政策。项目结果将通过Hoofprint（面向公众的基于网络的地理可视化工具）传播到更广泛的社会，该工具允许用户交互式地探索美国20个城市内的蹄印、肉棚和肉类正义维度。为了进一步普及关于肉类的知识以及消费对偏远地区和人民的深远影响，研究小组将策划和教授《城市的足迹》，这是一个多媒体可持续性案例模块，旨在促进参与式学习。这个在线案例将免费提供给教育工作者、学生、利益相关者和公众。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。