Benjamin Goldstein

The past decade has seen a renaissance of urban agriculture in the world's wealthy, northern cities. The practice of producing food in and around cities is championed as a method to reduce environmental impacts of urban food demands (reducing distance from farm to fork - ‘food miles’) whilst conferring a number of ancillary benefits to host cities...

Urban agriculture appears to be a means to combat the environmental pressure of increasing urbanization and food demand. However, there is hitherto limited knowledge of the efficiency and scaling up of practices of urban farming. Here, we review the claims on urban agriculture’s comparative performance relative to conventional food production. Our...

Assessments of urban metabolism (UM) are well situated to identify the scale, components, and direction of urban and energy flows in cities and have been instrumental in benchmarking and monitoring the key levers of urban environmental pressure, such as transport, space conditioning, and electricity. Hitherto, urban food consumption has garnered sc...

Cities now consume resources and produce waste in amounts that are incommensurate with the populations they contain. Quantifying and benchmarking the environmental impacts of cities is essential if urbanization of the world's growing population is to occur sustainably. Urban metabolism (UM) is a promising assessment form in that it provides the ann...

Food consumption is an important contributor to a city’s environmental impacts (carbon emissions, land occupation, water use, etc.) Urban farming (UF) has been advocated as a means to increase urban sustainability by reducing food-related transport and tapping into local resources. Taking Boston as an illustrative Northeast U.S. city, we developed...

Urban agriculture (UA) is often positioned as an environmentally sustainable food supply for cities. However, life cycle assessments (LCA) measuring environmental impacts of UA show mixed results, because of inconsistent application of LCA and reliance on hypothetical case studies. To address these shortcomings, we performed an LCA of eight urban f...

There is a lack of data on resources used and food produced at urban farms. This hampers attempts to quantify the environmental impacts of urban agriculture or craft policies for sustainable food production in cities. To address this gap, we used a citizen science approach to collect data from 72 urban agriculture sites, representing three types of...

Despite extensive literature on the socio-cultural services of urban open spaces, the role of food-producing spaces has not received sufficient attention. This hampers advocacy for preserving and growing urban agricultural activities, often dismissed on justifications that their contributions to overall food supply are negligible. To understand how...

Growing global demand for natural rubber is leading to increased deforestation for rubber plantations with consequences for biodiversity, carbon storage, and social dislocation. There has been little attention given to these issues in Sri Lanka, where the rubber production is central to economic growth. Although private initiatives and government r...

Urban agriculture (UA) is widely discussed as a key intervention for urban sustainability and resilience, but its multi-dimensional effects – food provision, community cohesion, job training, and more – have proven difficult to assess and plan for at the scale of a city. Furthermore, many UA services (e.g., mental health benefits) and disservices (...

Environmental merits are a common motivation for many urban agriculture (UA) projects. One powerful way of quantifying environmental impacts is with life cycle assessment (LCA): a method that estimates the environmental impacts of producing, using, and disposing of a good. LCAs of UA have proliferated in recent years, evaluating a diverse range of...

The United States (U.S.) imports 87 percent of its avocados from a single Mexican region, Michoacán. Although environmental and social costs associated with avocado production are significant, consumers and retailers in the U.S. cannot clearly discern them in part due to complex, opaque supply chains. In this paper, we use a novel methodology, TRAc...

Significance This study uses data on ∼93 million individual homes to perform the most comprehensive study of greenhouse gases from residential energy use in the United States. We provide nationwide rankings of carbon intensity of homes in states and ZIP codes and offer correlations between affluence, floor space, and emissions. Scenarios demonstrat...

Although fields such as industrial ecology have advanced our understanding of how cleaner technologies, recycling, and lifestyle changes can reduce the impacts of production and consumption on people and planet, environmental deterioration and social injustices stubbornly persist. New strategies are needed to achieve change in an era of increasing...

Essential for society to function, the production and consumption of food, energy, and water (FEW) are deeply intertwined, leading to calls for a nexus approach to understand and manage the complex tradeoffs and cascading effects. What research exists to date on this FEW nexus? How have scholars conceptualized these interactions at the urban scale?...

How we design human settlements has a profound influence on society’s environmental pressures. This chapter explores the current state of LCA applied to two scales of human settlements; individual buildings and the built environment, where the built environment is understood as a collection of autonomous buildings along with the infrastructure and...

The food demands of the United States (US) impart significant environmental pressures. The high rate of consumption of beef has been shown to be the largest driver of food-borne greenhouse gas emissions, water use and land occupation in the US diet. The environmental benefits of substituting animal products with vegetal foods are well documented, b...

Diets used in assessment. Table outlining the development of the baseline MUD, VEG and VGN diets, as well as their PBB substituted counterparts. (XLSX)

Life cycle environmental impacts. Spreadsheet showing the life cycle environmental impacts for individual food items, diets on the per capita level and national level consumption for GHG emissions, water consumption and land occupation. Also includes changes on impacts from PBB diffusion at different rates. (XLSX)

Nutritional data. Table outlining the nutritional properties of PBB and ground beef. Analytic methods for PBB are also noted. (XLSX)

Life cycle assessment methodology and life cycle inventories. PDF document detailing the life cycle assessment methodology employed here and the development of the life cycle inventories for the food products. (DOCX)

There is an increasing global interest in scaling up urban agriculture (UA) in its various forms, from private gardens to sophisticated commercial operations. Much of this interest is in the spirit of environmental protection, with reduced waste and transportation energy highlighted as some of the proposed benefits of UA; however, explicit consider...

Since the turn of the century a growing chorus of researchers has been espousing reduced meat and dairy intake as a partial strategy to transition towards a sustainable food system. Many of these studies have been predicated on a life-cycle assessment (LCA) methodology and though transparent in communicating their work within that framework, it has...

Assessments of urban metabolism (UM) are well situated to identify the scale, components, and direction of urban and energy flows in cities and have been instrumental in benchmarking and monitoring the key levers of urban environmental pressure, such as transport, space conditioning, and electricity. Hitherto, urban food consumption has garnered sc...

MS Thesis coupling life cycle assessment and urban metabolism accounting. Dated: September 2012.

Increasing urbanization and concurrent economic growth are shifting the scale and profile of global material and energy consumption regimes. Urban metabolism (UM) is well situated to identify the scale, components and direction of these flows, and has been instrumental in benchmarking and monitoring the key levers of urban environmental pressure su...

Presently, the supply chain supporting urban food consumption is placing stress on the environment at the planetary, regional and local scales. Despite the urban origin of global food demands, cities supply little of their own food, and are susceptible to disruptions across the global supply chain. One possible mitigation strategy to these issues i...

The necessity of assessing and addressing the environmental sustainability of urban systems is becoming increasingly relevant due to growing urbanization across the globe, higher consumption in urban systems and related competition for finite resource stocks. In this study we present how fused urban metabolism (UM) and life cycle assessment (LCA) c...

The state of building stocks changes over time. Owners and municipalities face the choice to renovate or rebuild buildings to improve energy efficiency. This review addresses how current sustainability assessment tools support these decisions. It finds that advanced tools are better tailored to evaluate project level energy-related decisions than a...