Research & reports

Pooja Boddupalli, Steffen Nijhuis, N. M. J. D. Tillie · Sustainability · Global

This systematic literature review investigated how landscape-based approaches (LbAs) and systems thinking (ST) have been concurrently applied to analyze and design urban agriculture and farming (UAF) initiatives. Screening 92 records, the study identified 12 peer-reviewed articles published between 2015 and 2025, reflecting the nascent state of this interdisciplinary approach. The findings revealed limited integration of spatial analysis with systems thinking across scales in current scholarship.

Sustiyana Sustiyana, Teguh Soedarto · Jurnal Agrosains Karya Kreatif dan Inovatif · Indonesia (Pamekasan)

This study aimed to analyze the influence of access to organic waste, training and education on waste management, government policy support, environmental and social awareness, and business opportunities on income and environmental preservation in sustainable urban farming in Pamekasan. Conducted at Roemah Maggot Nusantara, which uses Black Soldier Fly maggots for organic waste management, the study used multiple linear regression analysis. Results showed that all independent variables simultaneously had a significant effect on income and environmental preservation. However, partially, only environmental and social awareness had a significant effect, while access to organic waste, training and education, government policy support, and business opportunities did not show a significant effect.

Dario Cottafava, Francesco Marengo, Giuseppe Emiliano Di Martino, Laura Corazza · Business Strategy and the Environment · Global

This study introduced a social impact accounting framework, "accounting for the loops," for sustainability education for climate action (SECA), applying it to a university-led community garden case study. It found that a sense of belonging and personal recognition activate positive reinforcing loops. However, project size and community autonomy counterintuitively triggered balancing loops, leading to increased bureaucratic obstacles and institutional support needs, which negatively impacted participant motivation.

Kendel Constant · DigitalCommons - Kennesaw State University (Kennesaw State University) · Dominica

This thesis explores improving Dominica's urban agricultural sector, examining challenges like hurricanes, landslides, temperature shifts, limited adoption of advanced farming techniques, an aging farmer population, and soil erosion. The proposed Agricultural Learning Facility aims to address these issues by leveraging smart farming methods and enhancing traditional practices. However, the proposed greenhouse and hydroponic systems cannot completely replace traditional farming practices, but rather help increase food production.

Kinga Kimic, Magdalena Błaszczyk · Sustainability · Poland (Warsaw)

This study identified and assessed vegetable cultivation projects submitted to the Warsaw Participatory Budget (WPB) between 2015 and 2023. The research classified projects into six types and evaluated them across social, functional, ecological, and economic dimensions. The results showed that vegetable-related projects in the WPB were decidedly niche, with only 101 initiatives submitted and 31 implemented, primarily focusing on education for children rather than direct food access.

Guido Evangelista, Juan David Arosemena, Gaia Stringari, Joan Romanyà, Xavier Gabarrell, Francesco Orsini, Gara Villalba · Agriculture Ecosystems & Environment · Global

This study evaluated the application of 150 t ha-1 of ramial chipped wood (RCW) to degraded peri-urban agricultural soils, comparing its effects on yield, soil health, and greenhouse gas emissions for spinach and sweet potato. Spinach grown with RCW showed the lowest productivity (1.16 – 0.32 kg m-2) among treatments, while sweet potato achieved the highest yield (1.72 – 1.99 kg m-2). High RCW doses initially led to higher CO2 emissions but significantly reduced N2O emissions for spinach (from 0.36 kg ha-1 to 0.07 kg ha-1) and enhanced soil organic carbon and nitrogen stocks for sweet potato, indicating agronomic and environmental trade-offs.

Marta Melon, Tomasz Dzieduszyński, Piotr Sikorski, Beata Joanna Gawryszewska, Maciej Lasocki, Arkadiusz Przybysz · Sustainability · Poland (Warsaw)

The capacity of Family Allotment Gardens (FAGs) in Warsaw, Poland, to provide air-pollution filtration and microclimate regulation was quantified. Particulate matter, air temperature, and relative humidity were measured inside and outside three allotment complexes in autumn 2023. Results showed a moderate reduction in PM concentrations inside gardens (by about 2 µg/m³) and slightly higher humidity (2.1%). However, the cooling effect was weak (less than 0.3 °C), indicating a limited spatial range under autumn conditions.

Yizhi Zhang · · Global

This report systematically reviews the environmental performance of rooftop greenhouses, focusing on life cycle assessment (LCA) approaches. The review found that existing studies are limited, often case-specific, and use diverse methodologies, hindering comparisons. Environmental performance is highly context-dependent and influenced by methodological assumptions, with conventional LCA often failing to capture dynamic interactions between greenhouse operations, crop growth, and host buildings, leading to an incomplete representation of environmental performance.

Desalew Meseret Moges, Kristoffer Mattisson, Ebba Malmqvist, P Olsson · Environmental Challenges · Ethiopia

A study using satellite data from 2021–2024 examined urban heat and urban green space (UGS) patterns during the hot season across four Ethiopian cities. It found that UGS expanded in all cities, mainly along urban edges, and offered strong but spatially uneven cooling benefits. Daytime surface temperatures decreased, but nighttime temperatures showed mixed results, and dense central areas remained exposed to heat.

Farooq Ahmad Khan, Faheemullah Khan, Sumati Narayan, Mohammad Amir, Zaffar Mahdi Dar · International Journal of Research in Agronomy · Global

This review synthesizes the concept, design principles, carbon sequestration mechanisms, storage potential, and environmental benefits of carbon gardens, which are multifunctional landscapes designed to maximize carbon sequestration and deliver a wide range of ecosystem services. The article highlights their application in urban and rural landscapes and their integration with carbon-negative farming through practices such as biochar use and compost recycling. It also discusses key challenges related to carbon measurement, establishment costs, land availability, and long-term management.

Natalie Meyer, Simona Trandafir · Journal of Environmental Economics and Policy · United States (Rhode Island)

A choice-based survey of over 600 US residents from Rhode Island examined preferences and perceived value for green rooftop (GR) space allocations for agriculture, solar energy, and recreation. Latent class modeling revealed that Class 1, representing 20% of respondents, was generally unsupportive of GR installation and expressed disutility towards GR space allocation for solar energy. Both classes uniformly favored allocating GR space for agriculture production and showed a positive willingness to pay for this feature.

James Vandenberg, Kerstin Krellenberg · Sustainable Cities and Society · Global

This study investigated how differentiated configurations of outdoor, indoor, and greenhouse urban agriculture (UA) impact Urban Resilience Capacities (URCs). It found that a strategic, place-based, combinatorial approach to integrating UA typologies can produce mutually reinforcing outcomes, strengthening various URCs simultaneously. However, a strong risk of trade-offs exists when UA systems are not aligned, and a critical research gap remains as empirical case studies are concentrated in Europe and North America, overlooking experiences in the Global South.

Evelyn Seilhe Guerreiro, Márcio Luis Valença Araújo, Adilson Oliveira de Almirante, Eduardo Oliveira Teles, Aloísio Santos Nascimento Filho, Hugo Saba Pereira Cardoso · Journal of Bioengineering, Technologies and Health · Brazil

This study analyzed the integration of Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA), community gardens, and public health policies, using case studies from Brazilian cities such as Salvador, Recife, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro. CEA contributes to enhanced productivity in small spaces with reduced water and input consumption, while community gardens strengthen social cohesion, mental health, and local food supply. However, challenges remain regarding high implementation costs, regulatory gaps, and lack of institutional support.

Strayker Ali Muda, Heripan Heripan, Fitra Gustiar · Springer Link (Chiba Institute of Technology) · Indonesia (Palembang)

This systematic review examined strategies, trade-offs, and synergies of climate-smart urban agriculture relevant to Palembang City, Indonesia. A total of 400 records were identified from Google Scholar and Scopus, with 352 unique records screened. While urban agriculture showed five key contributions, including strengthening food security, several critical trade-offs were identified, such as land scarcity, energy and water requirements, soil contamination risks, technological costs, and policy fragmentation. The review emphasizes that urban agriculture should be part of a broader transformation of urban food systems, not a stand-alone solution.

Maria de Nazareth Oliveira Maciel, Daniel Pereira Pinheiro, Luann Yago Oliveira Maciel · Veredas do Direito Direito Ambiental e Desenvolvimento Sustentável · Brazil

This study analyzed the contributions and challenges of urban agriculture for food security in three municipalities of the Belém Metropolitan Region, Brazil. Using multivariate factor analysis with 120 producers from November 2023 to February 2024, findings indicated urban agriculture ensures food security and reduces food scarcity concerns. However, the activity lacks public policy incentives for seed acquisition and land titling, hindering its advancement.

Charlotte Potter, Silvia Sarapura, Camilo Jimenez Gonzalez, Justina Walker-Mohamed, Paul Benalcazer, Biinjitiwaabik Zaagging Anishinaabek, Netmizaaggamig Nishnabeg, Red Rock Indian Band · Rural Review Ontario Rural Planning Development and Policy · Canada (Northern Ontario)

The 'Braiding Food Systems' project, a community-led partnership with three Northern Ontario First Nations, used mixed-methods Participatory Action Research to examine conditions influencing food security and sovereignty. Community members identified structural constraints rooted in colonial governance, contemporary ecological pressures, and local transformation opportunities. This research demonstrates that sustained, community-led collaboration can counterbalance colonial food systems by reorganizing decisions, strengthening access, and enhancing resilience within Indigenous food networks.

Jonas Sohn, Juliane Dziumla, Atiqah Fairuz Salleh, George Xydis · Sustainability Nexus Forum · Global

This study evaluated vertical farming (VF) through the resource nexus (RN) lens, emphasizing the interdependencies among energy, water, land, and materials. While VF offers advantages such as space efficiency, water conservation, and climate resilience, it was found to entail high energy demands, material dependencies, and economic feasibility challenges. An overview of these synergies and constraints helps identify mitigation strategies like circular water systems and hybrid renewable energy solutions.

Katie J. Field, Yolima Carrillo, Stuart A. Campbell, Jurriaan Ton, Adam Frew · Plants People Planet · Global

This special issue presents an innovative framework for sustainable land use, leveraging synergies between plants, soils, and societies to address global environmental crises and food insecurity. It notes that human activities, including land clearing for agriculture, rapid urban sprawl, and heavy use of chemical inputs, have pushed biogeochemical cycles of carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus beyond their safe operating limits. The collection of papers collectively emphasizes the need for a fundamental shift in managing plant, soil, microbes, and human systems as interdependent components.

Elías Machado · Editora Científica Digital eBooks · Brazil (Guarapuava)

This study examines the relationship between climate change, urbanization, and urban and peri-urban agriculture in Guarapuava-PR, Brazil. It emphasizes how regional atmospheric variability intensifies existing socio-environmental vulnerabilities. Guarapuava's climate, characterized by high thermal amplitude, frequent frosts, and irregular rainfall, significantly conditions agricultural production systems, especially in urban and peri-urban areas, negatively affecting productive cycles.

Sofyan Sufri, Jonatan Lassa · Environmental Hazards · Indonesia (Aceh)

This article examined the barriers and opportunities of the Climate Village Programme (ProKlim) in Aceh, Indonesia. Key stakeholder interviews (N=38) and policy content analysis in three villages within Banda Aceh city revealed hypothetical barriers to CCAM, including the absence of a sustained mechanism for effective flood adaptation, insufficient resources for supporting adaptive urban agriculture practices, lack of community participation, and inadequate integration of scientific and local knowledge into early warning systems. Despite ProKlim being an innovative program, challenges remained, as past disaster events were viewed as distant memories, hindering proactive risk reduction efforts by local authorities and residents.

Wendpouiré Léticia Nadège Nonguierma, Jean-Marie Dipama · Afrique contemporaine · Africa

A study of the "Ceinture verte" (Green Belt) in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, as a nature-based response to climate adaptation. Established in 1976 and relaunched in 2018, the initiative combines forestry development with urban agriculture, aiming to contain urban sprawl, improve the local climate and strengthen the capital's resilience. The study combined a diachronic analysis of Landsat imagery from 1984-2024 with interviews of institutional actors, associative partners and direct beneficiaries. Results show significant contributions — expansion of dense vegetation in some areas, a perceived improvement in air quality, the creation of income-generating market-gardening activities, and the inclusion of vulnerable populations — but also reveal strong constraints: illegal occupations covering a significant share of the land, fragmented governance, limited access to water, security fragility, and still-limited involvement of local residents. The study discusses the feasibility of a trajectory to 2050 between an optimistic scenario conditional on structural reforms and a critical scenario underscoring current limits, and offers lessons transferable to urban adaptation policies in other Sahelian metropolises.

Ayhan Horuz, Güney Akınoğlu · · Turkey

A Turkish book chapter arguing that agriculture-derived air pollution, compounded by growing industrial and urban pollutant loads, is threatening food production, product quality, and food security by directly and indirectly impairing plant growth and development. It notes that population growth, energy production, transportation, waste management, and biomass burning have substantially increased atmospheric organic and inorganic pollutants, pushing air quality beyond acceptable limits in many regions. The first part evaluates the effects on agroecosystems of tropospheric (ground-level) ozone, PM2.5 and PM10, nitrogen oxides (NOx), sulfur dioxide (SO2), agricultural ammonia (NH3), and volatile organic compounds (VOCs), detailing how tropospheric ozone suppresses photosynthesis causing yield losses in staple crops such as wheat and soybean, and how particulate matter directly and indirectly affects soil and plant health, alongside the effects of acid rain and nitrogen deposition on soil fertility, water quality, and ecosystem balance, assessed against the four pillars of food security—availability, access, utilization, and stability. The second part discusses integrated policy approaches, industrial emission control technologies, and low-emission transport systems at the macro level, alongside agricultural strategies such as precision farming, improved fertilizer management, and innovative production techniques, and the role of green infrastructure in urban planning.

Joan Casanelles-Abella, Monika Egerer · Frontiers in Sustainable Cities · Global

A perspective article discusses biodiversity conservation in cities as often afflicted by "suboptimal" situations where human needs and nature's needs are imbalanced or in conflict. In human-dominated landscapes, land use intensification often replaces large habitat patches critical for metapopulation stability with smaller, isolated patches, a pattern Island Biogeography Theory predicts will reduce biodiversity; this may be most extreme in cities experiencing rapid population growth and infrastructure densification, where small urban green spaces, balconies, home and allotment gardens, small forest patches and green walls, become the primary compensatory interventions for retaining habitat. However, under certain conservation frameworks (land-sparing vs. land-sharing, the SLOSS debate), such small, scattered urban green spaces may be predicted to produce suboptimal or even detrimental biodiversity outcomes if their size and isolation prevent them from sustaining viable population sizes. The article notes this "ecology of suboptimals" framing risks a futile perspective on nature conservation in densifying cities, while also considering how rethinking urban environments in light of this situation might be approached.

Candice M. Duncan, Fatemeh Ghezelsofla, Hlengilizwe Nyoni, Jazmin Escobar, Odette Mina · Toxics · United States

A study measuring per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in irrigation water at two organic farms in Maryland, USA, with no known direct PFAS input, and assessing health risk via a Hazard Index (HI). At agricultural site 1 (AG1), the most abundant compounds were PFBS (37 ng/L), PFBA (24 ng/L) and PFHxA (22 ng/L); the HI showed compliance for branched PFHxS (0.39) but non-compliance for linear PFHxS (1.51). At agricultural site 2 (AG2), despite no known industrial or PFAS-related facilities nearby, HFPO-DA (GenX) was detected at 28 ng/L, and the HI exceeded the compliance threshold (HI = 2.83), with GenX accounting for most of the calculated risk. The findings show HI exceedances occurring at small farm sites with no identifiable contamination source.

Akhil S Anand, Hannes Pravida, Fredrik Fossan-Waage, Tormod Skorpe Skjolden, Giulia Robbiani, Younes Zahraoui, Emil Wolff Anthony, Jayaprakash Rajasekharan, Sissel Torre, Knut Asbjørn Solhaug, Sebastien Gros · Frontiers in Horticulture · Global

A paper on vertical farming — a controlled-environment agriculture system — examines its potential integration with energy markets. It states that vertical farming's economic viability is constrained by high capital and operational costs, a substantial share of which is energy expenditure, and explores how vertical farms could participate in day-ahead, balancing, and flexibility energy markets by adjusting lighting and climate-control energy use in response to market signals, potentially reducing costs and generating additional revenue. It identifies gaps in understanding of plant responses to variable lighting as a critical barrier to implementation and illustrates these integration challenges through small-scale laboratory experiments.