Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: JUST GROW: Co-designing justice-centric indicators and governance principles to intensify urban agriculture sustainably and equitably

该奖项通过贝尔蒙特论坛，为参与由55个国家的全球变化研究倡议竞争性选择的项目的美国研究人员提供支持。 贝尔蒙特论坛是一个由研究供资组织组成的联合会，其重点是支持对全球环境变化挑战和机遇采取跨学科办法。 它的目的是通过调整和调动国际资源，加快提供最迫切需要的国际研究，以消除可持续性的关键障碍。每个伙伴国家都在一个财团内为其研究人员提供资金，以减轻跨越国际边界的资金需求。这一办法有助于有效利用国家资源，支持对具有全球意义的专题进行出色的研究，最好通过多国办法加以处理，同时认识到全球挑战需要全球解决办法。该奖项为美国研究人员提供支持，使他们能够在由至少三个参与国的合作伙伴组成的联盟中进行合作。 这些团队将开发和采用新的跨学科方法，将可持续消费和生产作为一个社会技术系统来解决，以帮助为可持续、有弹性和公正的消费和生产系统提供决策信息。该项目侧重于城市地区和城市农业在可持续地加强农业生产以满足21世纪全球粮食需求方面可以发挥的作用。加大对城市地区粮食系统本地化的投资，将城市及其周边地区的粮食生产结合起来，有望缩短供应链，将生产者与消费者重新联系起来，提高社会生态的可持续性和复原力。可持续的城市农业集约化可能需要更多地使用使粮食生产与季节性气候和现有土地基础等环境制约因素脱钩的技术。拟议的技术系统包括资本密集型办法，如完全控制生长环境的垂直农场，以及知识密集型办法，如平衡环境改造与作物多样性和农艺适应的城市农业生态学。虽然正在调查这些生产系统在能源和土地使用强度、生命周期影响和产量方面的相对资源需求、环境足迹和生产力，本研究将着重于比较评估不同途径对可持续城市的公平和正义影响，该奖项反映了NSF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。

This award provides support to U.S. researchers participating in a project competitively selected by a 55-country initiative on global change research through the Belmont Forum. The Belmont Forum is a consortium of research funding organizations focused on support for transdisciplinary approaches to global environmental change challenges and opportunities. It aims to accelerate delivery of the international research most urgently needed to remove critical barriers to sustainability by aligning and mobilizing international resources. Each partner country provides funding for their researchers within a consortium to alleviate the need for funds to cross international borders. This approach facilitates effective leveraging of national resources to support excellent research on topics of global relevance best tackled through a multinational approach, recognizing that global challenges need global solutions. This award provides support for the U.S. researchers to cooperate in consortia that consist of partners from at least three of the participating countries. The teams will develop and employ new transdisciplinary approaches to address sustainable consumption and production as a socio-technical system to help inform decision-making for sustainable, resilient, and just systems of consumption and production.The project focuses on the role that city regions and urban agriculture can play in sustainably intensifying agricultural production to meet global food needs in the 21st century. Greater investment in localizing city region food systems—combining food production in cities and their peri-urban landscapes—promises to shorten supply chains and reconnect producers with consumers, improving socio-ecological sustainability and resilience. Sustainable urban agricultural intensification is likely to entail greater use of technologies that decouple food production from environmental constraints including seasonal climates and available land base. Proposed technological systems range from capital-intensive approaches such as vertical farms, which fully control the growing environment, to more knowledge-intensive approaches such as urban agroecology that balance environmental modification with crop diversity and agronomic adaptation. While knowledge of the relative resource requirements, environmental footprints, and productivity of these production systems in terms of energy and land-use intensity, life cycle impacts, and yield are being investigated, this study will focus on comparatively evaluating the equity and justice implications of different pathways toward a sustainable city-region food system.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.