Growing Resilience: The Urban Agriculture Potential in Metro Phoenix

With over half of the world’s population living in cities, investments in urban areas have disproportionate potential to improve resilience. Investment in urban agriculture have the potential to deliver considerable economic, environmental, and human well-being returns. Although recent global (“top down”) studies report significant variability in benefits from urban agriculture, they are unable to provide fine-scale estimates for individual urban areas. On the other hand, most city-scale studies do not evaluate the benefits of urban agriculture holistically, or align the benefits with city-specific goals. This paper aims to fill this gap by using a city-scale framework to estimate the benefits from urban agriculture for Phoenix, the fifth largest city in the USA by population. The estimated benefits are evaluated based on their ability to contribute to Phoenix’s 2050 Sustainability Goals. Multiple fine-scale datasets are used to determine potential growing area and are combined with locally specific socioeconomic, agricultural, biophysical, and infrastructure parameters in a Google Earth Engine algorithm. Benefits that contribute to the city’s Sustainability Goals include the amount and value of local food production, but also the provision of green space, energy savings, and avoided GHG emissions from transport and building energy use, and particulate matter emissions from dust. Demonstrating the diversity of salient benefits from urban agriculture and quantifying their impacts for the city’s Sustainability Goals could spur urban residents and decision makers to engage more broadly with urban agriculture as a tool for improving urban resilience within Phoenix and for other large cities across the globe.