Urban and peri-urban agriculture have emerged as a more sustainable alternative to produce food. They include vertical farming, integrated greenhouse rooftops in buildings, local woodsheds, etc. As they reach maturity in the mid to long-term, they are being designed to recirculate and minimise the use of resources such as nutrients, water, substrates and CO2, as well as reduce energy and water use providing benefits for air quality and biodiversity in cities. Therefore, it is expected that urban agriculture will provide low carbon, more sustainable food production compared to rural, more traditional agriculture systems.

Understanding and quantifying the effective contribution that urban agriculture will make to the environmental sustainability of cities requires the ability to both evaluate its environmental impacts in the future and to compare them to the impacts of traditional agriculture in the same future context.

The project PROspecTive Environmental AssessmeNt of Urban Agriculture-Emerging Systems (PROTEAN) will focus on developing temporally-explicit environmental impact assessment models for both urban and traditional agriculture to determine the extent to which urban agriculture may contribute to the sustainability of future food production. These ex-ante, temporally-explicit environmental impact assessments will also help to flag influenceable system parameters that can make urban agriculture more environmentally sustainable.

Providing assertive guidance on how to improve urban agriculture, depends on our current capacity to understand the key leavers of change that may drive the future impacts of these systems. PROTEAN focus on understanding these.