1. Recent scientific consensus suggests that humans are surpassing the Earth's safe boundaries in terms of providing resources and absorbing waste in a sustainable manner.
2. Urban agriculture (UA) has been proposed as a supply-side urban design intervention to give cities agency over their food demands, with estimates suggesting it could provide up to 100% of global urban vegetable needs.
3. This article reviews the environmental performance of UA, looking at its ability to reduce building energy consumption, its potential for urban symbiosis, supply chain efficiencies, and in situ/ex situ environmental improvements.
The article provides an overview of the potential environmental benefits of urban agriculture (UA). It is well-researched and provides a comprehensive review of the literature on UA’s environmental performance. The authors have done an excellent job in summarizing the existing evidence on UA’s environmental performance and providing an overview of the various claims made about its potential benefits.
However, there are some areas where the article could be improved upon. For example, while the authors do mention some possible risks associated with UA (e.g., warming greenhouses in northern climes), they do not provide any detailed discussion or analysis of these risks or their implications for UA’s overall environmental performance. Additionally, while the authors provide a comprehensive review of existing literature on UA’s environmental performance, they do not discuss any counterarguments or alternative perspectives on this topic. Furthermore, while they provide an overview of different types of UA systems and their respective material use and energy consumption profiles, they do not explore how large-scale implementation of these systems would affect citywide material and energy fluxes at a larger scale.
In conclusion, this article provides a comprehensive overview of existing research on UA’s environmental performance but could be improved by providing more detailed discussion and analysis of potential risks associated with UA as well as exploring alternative perspectives on this topic and examining how large-scale implementation would affect citywide material and energy fluxes at a larger scale.