Dana Boyer
University of Minnesota
Dana Boyer is pursuing a PhD researching urban food systems in the Center for Science Technology and Policy. She works as part of the Sustainable Cities Group, combining policy, engineering, and industrial to better understand the water, land energy, and greenhouse gas impacts of city food demand in Indian, US, and Chinese cities. Prior to Minnesota she received a Masters Degree (MPhil) in Engineering from the University of Cambridge studying at the Center for Sustainable Development. She has Bachelors Degrees in Environmental Engineering (BS) and German Studies (BA), minoring in Landscape Design, from the University of Connecticut. Beyond academia, she has worked on various engineering and development projects in Latin America, the US, UK and India.
Attention to the urban food system has grown substantially in recent years, with the food system referring to all activities that support the provision of food in society—including agricultural production, post-harvest handling, storage, transport, retail, commercial preparation, industrial processing, home use (i.e., final consumption), and waste management.
Cities globally are beginning to take action to address diverse food-related concerns including, health and nutrition, equity, resilience and environmental sustainability often creating action plans outlining proposed interventions. Cities are therefore becoming more proactive players in maintaining their food supply while also addressing sustainability and climate action challenges. Many city food system actions such as greater local production, better food waste management, more equitable food provision, and campaigns to encourage diet changes advertise several (assumed) environmental co-benefits; however, few analytic frameworks and methods are available to assess how various food system concerns (i.e. equity, health, nutrition, environment) may coincide, or conflict, with city climate action and sustainability planning.
This paper applies an urban metabolism and footprinting framework to quantify the role of city-scale food system actions on water, energy/GHG and land impacts.
We apply a urban food-energy-water (FEW) nexus framework (Ramaswami et al. 2017, In press) to Delhi, India. We: 1) present a baseline coupled GHG and water footprint analysis of community-wide food provisioning to Delhi, India, a city in a rapidly developing and populous nation ; and 2) conduct a first-order analysis of city-scale food system actions, quantifying GHG, water and land impacts disaggregating in- and trans-boundary impacts. City-scale actions examined include a) changes in residential diet; b) greater equity of household consumption; c) greater localization of food production through various modes of urban agriculture; d) improved food waste management and 5) cooking fuel interventions. The benefits of such analysis include:
- Ability to compare system-wide impacts of city-scale actions compared with actions typically implemented outside of the city (i.e. addressing pre-consumer food waste);
- Informing city-scale policy and action in data poor environments, allowing cities to identify and quantify the environmental co-benefits;
- Determining the largest policy levers in terms of mitigating water and GHG impact, either one or both;
- Assessing resource impact of greater equity in the food system within the city;
- Determining city strategies able to address both water, GHG and land impacts.
Acknowledgement
The authors are grateful for support from NSF (Partnership for International Research and Education award 1243535 and Sustainability Research Networks award 1444745).
Reference
Ramaswami, Anu, Dana Boyer, Ajay Singh Nagpure, Andrew Fang, Shelly Bogra, Bhavik Bakshi, Elliot Cohen, Ashish Rao-Ghorpade. 2017. An urban systems framework to assess the trans-boundary food-energy-water nexus: implementation in Delhi, India. Environmental Research Letters
• Industrial ecology in developing countries , • Food, energy, water, and nutrient material flows and footprints , • Sustainable urban systems
