Rurban Revolution: Can ruralising urban areas through greening and growing create a healthy, sustainable & resilient food system?

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Food is a growing challenge for us as a society.Food is damaging the nation's health with overconsumption and poor dietary choices leading to an epidemic of obesity and associated diseases such as diabetes in the UK and other countries. Part of the reason behind this obesity crisis is a crisis in mental health - stress drives poor eating habits. Another aspect is poor access to nutritious food - the UK has very high levels of food insecurity compared with other high income countries.At a global level, agriculture is a major cause of environmental harm and raises important questions about the sustainability and longevity of our current approach to food production and consumption. The need for land expansion to meet our growing food demands is causing widespread deforestation and soil degradation, and 30% of greenhouse gas emissions derive from agriculture, contributing to climate change with major knock-on effects for ecosystems and people. In addition to the challenges that increasing land use pressures and climate change are presenting to ensuring stable and adequate supply of good quality nutritious food into supply chains, the UK is facing further challenges as we prepare for Brexit. Potential changes to labour and farm payments throw a lot of uncertainty on the viability of domestic horticultural production, and uncertainty around trade agreements creates questions about the future supply of fruit and vegetables - 30% of which currently derive from the EU. This project will investigate the potential of a new idea - rurbanisation (rural-isation of urban areas) - as a holistic solution to these problems. Rurbanisation is a vision for radically increasing the amount of space we devote to greenery and food growing in cities. This idea could combat our food problems by:- helping to reconnect people with food and nature, reducing stress and increasing access to fruit and vegetables.- increasing urban food production, reducing the amount of food we need to grow outside cities, making space for nature inside and outside cities, and shortening supply chains, and- increasing domestic production and supply of fruit and vegetables that are key to the nation's health. In the past, food system shocks have created rapid rises in urban growing, and individuals and communities taking more responsibility for growing their own food e.g. Dig for Victory and Cuba post-Soviet Union collapse. Could we use rurbanisation as a pre-emptive measure for increasing food security?The idea of rurbanisation also poses many questions and problems. Community urban growing already exists and can be very beneficial for those involved. However, there are barriers such as land access, skills and time availability that hinder the expansion of these activities. How can we upscale this activity and are there business or regulation solutions for promoting this? How does urban food compare to conventional food in terms of nutritional value and safety?In this project we are bringing together expertise across nutrition and psychology, crop and food sciences, ecosystems and climate change and political and social sciences to build an evidence base on the potential of rurbanisation for transforming our food system in a sustainable and resilient way, so it can contribute to healther lifestyles. We give particular importance in exploring the barriers to rurbanisation and potential ways to overcome these. Through spatial data analyses, surveys, interviews and field and laboratory experiments we will explore how would rurbanisation influence: - Healthy and sustainable diets by improving availability, access and consumption of fruit and vegetables. - Food production in terms of quantity, quality and safety and the resilience of the UK food system. - Ecosystem service delivery inside and outside cities.And - How we could overcome the barriers to rurbanisation and maximise benefits.