Urban agricultural typologies and the need to quantify their potential to reduce a city's environmental 'foodprint'

Presently, the supply chain supporting urban food consumption is placing stress on the environment at the planetary, regional and local scales. Despite the urban origin of global food demands, cities supply little of their own food, and are susceptible to disruptions across the global supply chain. One possible mitigation strategy to these issues is increasing food production in and around cities using urban agriculture (UA).
Through a literature review, we found claims surrounding UA as a way to attenuate a cornucopia of environmental burdens due to urban food needs, but that their veracity remains inconclusive. A comprehensive analysis of the environmental performance of dominant UA forms is therefore needed. However, the review also found paucity in meaningful systematics that described UA systemsbased on attributes important to environmental performance. We addressed this by developing a system that categorizes UA into five broad types that are optimized for comparing environmental performance.