11 Key Resilience Outcomes

Urban farms and living compost hubs deliver 11 key outcomes which are critical to enabling our cities and towns to thrive in the 21st century. Read on for more detail on each of these outcomes.

CARBON DRAWDOWN

High-quality, living soil combined with diverse and dense plant life is the most powerful carbon-capture system on the planet. By increasing the amount of organic matter in our soil by 1%, 5 tons of carbon can be drawn down from the atmosphere per hectare.

Humans have been moving Earth’s carbon stores from the soil into the atmosphere to such an extent that our climate is now changing rapidly, posing an enormous threat to the wellbeing and survival of all species. For the last 70 years, the industrial food-production engine has been driven by fossil fuels, pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. We can redesign the food system while mitigating climate change, using CO2 as an abundant raw material. Luckily, converting CO2 into food is what plants specialise in; we just need to harness this potential.

FOOD & NUTRITION SECURITY

In Aotearoa, our food isn’t as nutritious as it once was. Our soils are degraded by high fertiliser and pesticide use, and our farmers are struggling. Drought and disease outbreaks cause huge crop losses each year, and many of our cities are at risk of becoming cut off from food transport in the event of a natural disaster. Food prices are rising, food poverty is at a record high, and our health system is unable to cope with a huge chronic disease burden linked to poor diet. 

86% of New Zealanders live in cities and towns of more than 1000 people, and this is projected to rise. Our urban areas are sprawling, with a lot of good arable land being used for housing. However, almost three-quarters of all farms worldwide are smaller than the typical city block, and such farms feed 70% of the world’s people, producing more than twice as much food per acre than large farms. 

Small pieces of land in the city, such as parks, berms, vacant lots, backyards, rooftops, and even derelict buildings, can be adapted for food growing and connected in a network that has a large total food-growing area and numerous market niches. 

The dynamic knowledge creation and exchange that happens in cities can ever-improve the urban farming model, and even feed knowledge back into the rural farming sector, turning the '“urban-rural divide” into an urban-rural synergy. This is how we create regenerative, low-carbon, secure food systems.

BIODIVERSITY

We are facing a biodiversity crisis, with a loss of species at 100 to 1000 times greater rates than is natural, as a result of human activity. A significant contributor to this crisis is the use of synthetic fertilisers and biocides, tilling, and monocultures typical of conventional agriculture, which degrade our soils and drive biodiversity loss both on land and in water.

High biodiversity, both above and below ground, is critical to ecosystem function, including the resilience of our food systems to changing conditions, disease, and drought. Urban farms are havens for biodiversity, both below and above the ground. Healthy soil and high plant diversity attracts a wide range of pollinators, other insects, worms, fungi, birds, and more. 

Building a network of urban farms will form green corridors through our cities, allowing biodiversity to flourish, including our native taonga.

NUTRIENT RECOVERY

28% of all waste sent to landfill in NZ, and half of all residential rubbish, is compostable. This is a huge, untapped resource that can be turned into compost and enable urban food production. 

Good compost is the keystone of sustainable food systems. Through composting, organic waste can be turned back into soil to draw down carbon, grow food, and regenerate our environment.

Sending this resource to landfill degrades our environment, contributes to climate change, and removes nutrients from natural cycles. It means we continue to borrow off our future food budget and increases our need for synthetic fertilisers that degrade and erode our soils over time.

95% of our food currently comes from the soil, but we are losing soil fast, resulting in a reduction of food yields, while the number of people that need feeding is growing. 

Our solution is decentralised networks of community-scale compost hubs throughout our cities. Scaled up and out, they will absorb a significant proportion of local organic waste and turn it into high-quality living compost that will feed an overlapping network of urban farms.

LOCAL SKILLS & JOBS

We are energising the professional sector of regenerative agriculturalists. Local compost hubs and urban farms will provide highly skilled, rewarding, health-promoting jobs and careers for current and future New Zealanders, especially young people facing an uncertain future. 

Young graduates are often short on career options in NZ, and their huge student loans limit their ability to pursue career prospects overseas. Our youth unemployment rate is substantially higher than the NZ average; 10.3% compared to 4.2% as at July 2019. By regenerating their local environment and providing for their communities, young people can take pride in their work and feel empowered and optimistic to build a future they want to live in.

Our projects in the Urban Farmers’ Alliance create safe, stimulating spaces and volunteering opportunities through which all members of our local communities can learn and upskill.

COMMUNITY BUILDING

Urban farms become a focal point for community engagement. Their purpose, momentum and positivity attract large amounts of visitors and volunteers.

By creating food loops within the community, with locals visiting their local urban farm to pick up their weekly produce box and drop off their compost, and attend events and working bees, we help to knit the local community together through shared food experiences; building community connectedness through kaitiakitanga, whanaungatanga and manaakitanga.

We help communities celebrate their diversity and collective identity through growing and sharing culturally relevant food in a co-created process.

WATER CONSERVATION

Water is a precious resource, but in times of drought, irrigation in urban areas is one of the first kinds of water use to be restricted, which has consequences for urban food growing and our food reserves.

By improving the health of our urban soils, we increase their capacity to absorb, filter and purify water and thus help buffer against drought, and erosive heavy rainfall.

For every 1% increase in soil organic (carbon-based) matter, each hectare can hold up to another 170,000 L of water, which is then available to plants. Healthy soil also acts as a filter and slows runoff. In contrast, conventional agricultural practices such as tilling degrade soil, reducing its capacity to hold onto water and nutrients. This degradation of soil leads to excessive fertiliser use, impacting the health of our waterways. 

Stormwater management is also increasingly important as heavy rainfall and flooding become more frequent. Strategically incorporating urban farms and reservoirs into major flooding zones to help absorb excess water and store it for irrigation could also be a way of mitigating flooding and reducing strain on stormwater systems. Rooftop farms are especially promising for this.

COOLING MICROCLIMATES

Urban areas are often warmer than the surrounding rural areas, due to reduced evaporative cooling, the large amount of dark-coloured area (roading, buildings, etc.) attracting and retaining heat, and waste heat generated by vehicles and buildings. The severity of this ‘heat island effect’ also depends on the climate, but can amplify heat discomfort, ramping up energy use for air conditioning, and may even have measurable effects on climate phenomena at the global scale.

Vegetation in urban areas mitigates the heat island effect through evapotranspiration and providing shade. Urban farms throughout our cities, will act as cool green oases that reduce heat stress and make our cities more beautiful, uplifting the physical and mental wellbeing of urbanites now and into a warmer future.

LAND REHABILITATION

In urban areas, much of the remaining accessible soil is of poor quality, due to contamination, neglect, dumping, and more. Vacant and neglected spaces are often overgrown and unsightly,  but can quickly be turned into urban farms, temporary or permanent. Healthy soil biology has an incredible capacity to detoxify contaminants over time; fungal remediation has successfully been used to remediate land to the point where it can grow healthy food. Contaminated land can be turned into “carbon farms”, drawing down carbon while detoxifying the soil, enabling the land to be used for food production in the future, while food can be grown on top. In this way, urban farming can greatly improve urban land use efficiency.

AIR QUALITY

Plants are the lungs of our planet. Maximising the capacity of photosynthesis is essential to combat the deforestation occurring in rural areas around the planet. At a local level, urban farms, with their fast rate of plant growth, not only improve air quality by drawing down carbon and releasing oxygen, but act as biomonitors of air pollution, which must be controlled due to its harmful effects on human health and the environment.

OPTIMISM

With the challenges we all face this century, optimism is an invaluable asset we must focus on generating, especially in our young people. Urban farms are centres for inspiration and learning, demonstrating how effective they can be in bringing about environmental and social change. 

One of our major focuses is upskilling people to start similar projects in their neighbourhood, and scale out these benefits. These lush, biodiverse oases are uplifting places to be in, and a place where locals find common ground. Being able to visit a local urban farm, get your hands in the soil, meet your neighbours, learn a new skill, and give something back to the community is empowering and generates optimism. Urban farm managers are onsite to facilitate this all throughout the week.

Members of the Urban Farmers’ Alliance are working to collect robust data across Aotearoa to measure the value created by our projects according to these 11 outcomes. Read more about our key datasets here.