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International audience; The City Region Food Systems approach has been proposed to achieve food system resilience and nutrition security while promoting the urgent ecological transition within urban and peri-urban areas, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the great diversity of the initiatives composing City Region Food Systems in Europe poses barriers to the assessment of their integrated sustainability. Hence, the present work is developed within the EU-H2020 project Food System in European Cities (FoodE), to build a consistentsustainability scoring system that allows comparative evaluation of City Region Food System Initiatives. Adopting a Life Cycle Thinking approach, it advances on existing knowledge and past projects, taking advantage of a participatory process, with stakeholders from multidisciplinary expertise. As a result, the research designs, and tests on 100 case studies a simplified and ready-to-use scoring mechanism based on a quali-quantitative appraisal survey tool, delivering a final sustainability score on a 1-5 points scale, to get insights on the social, economic, and environmental impacts. As in line with the needs of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the outcome represents a step forward for the sustainable development and social innovation of food communities in cities and regions, providing a practical and empirical lens for improvedplanning and governance.

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 spaces (urban farms, collective gardens, individual gardens), in five countries (France, Germany, Poland, United Kingdom, and United States). We answered three key questions about urban agriculture with this unprecedented dataset: (1) What are its land, water, nutrient, and energy demands? (2) How productive is it relative to conventional agriculture and across types of farms? and (3) What are its contributions to local biodiversity? We found that participant farms used dozens of inputs, most of which were organic (e.g., manure for fertilizers). Farms required on average 71.6 L of irrigation water, 5.5 L of compost, and 0.53 m2 of land per kilogram of harvested food. Irrigation was lower in individual gardens and higher in sites using drip irrigation. While extremely variable, yields at well-managed urban farms can exceed those of conventional counterparts. Although farm type did not predict yield, our cluster analysis demonstrated that individually managed leisure gardens had lower yields than other farms and gardens. Farms in our sample contributed significantly to local biodiversity, with an average of 20 different crops per farm not including ornamental plants. Aside from clarifying important trends in resource use at urban farms using a robust and open dataset, this study also raises numerous questions about how crop selection and growing practices influence the environmental impacts of growing food in cities. We conclude with a research agenda to tackle these and other pressing questions on resource use at urban farms.

With the rapid growth of professional intra-urban agriculture (PIUA) projects in the Global North, sponsors, projects leaders, and experts developing these projects are seeking to evaluate their sustainability. As existing assessment tools are not adapted to PIUA projects, they establish their own assessment practices. Our study examines these practices to identify their original features, criteria, and indicators used. To this end, we analysed 19 case studies of different PIUA projects. We identified four dimensions underpinning sustainability assessment, namely, internal sustainability, external sustainability, the project leader’s credibility, and the innovative nature of the project. We also shed light on the wide diversity of the 67 assessment criteria identified, as well as the qualitative nature of 78% of indicators used. In addition, our study highlights that assessment practices evolve over time as the project progresses from ideation to implementation, according to the variety of assessment situations. Our study is the first to provide an in-depth exploration of PIUA stakeholders’ sustainability assessment practices and to shed light on their specific features. Our results afford a better understanding of the way the sustainability of PIUA projects is assessed and contribute to reflection on the design of a flexible assessment tool, considering the diverse criteria and practices used by stakeholders to assess the sustainability of PIUA.

chapitre de l'ouvrage de notice https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03829916; International audience

Purpose of review The review of potential therapies in the treatment of hyperoxaluria is timely, given the current excitement with clinical trials and the mounting evidence of the importance of oxalate in both kidney stone and chronic kidney disease. Recent findings Given the significant contribution of both endogenous and dietary oxalate to urinary oxalate excretions, it is not surprising therapeutic targets are being studied in both pathways. This article covers the existing data on endogenous and dietary oxalate and the current targets in these pathways. Summary In the near future, there will likely be therapies targeting both endogenous and dietary oxalate, especially in subsets of kidney stone formers.

Ecrit par des chercheuses d’AgroParisTech, de l’INRAE et du CNRS et illustré/mis en forme par Claire Painchaud, cet ouvrage interactif est un outil pédagogique pensé pour les enfants de 8 à 12 ans pour introduire les notions autour du système alimentaire durable passant par 5 étapes (production, transformation, distribution, consommation et gestion des déchets) présentant à chaque fois différents modes ou systèmes associant une présentation, une définition de terme et une activité à faire avec les enfants (quizz, recettes, lien vidéo…). Le parcours se fait en suivant 2 personnages, Marah et Arti, dans la ville de Terrix City afin de comprendre tout ce que cache notre assiette.

Attention to urban agriculture (UA) has recently grown among practitioners, scientists, and the public, resulting in several initiatives worldwide. Despite the positive perception of modern UA and locally grown, fresh produce, the potential food safety risks connected to these practices may be underestimated, leading to regulatory gaps. Thus, there is a need for assessment tools to evaluate the food safety risks connected to specific UA initiatives, to assist practitioners in self-evaluation and control, and to provide policy makers and scholars a means to pursue and assess food safety in city regions, avoiding either a lack or an excess of regulation that could ultimately hinder the sector. To address this aim, this paper reviews the most recent and relevant literature on UA food safety assessments. Food safety indicators were identified first. Then, a food safety assessment framework for UA initiatives was developed. The framework uses business surveys and food analyses (if available) as a data source for calculating a food safety index for single UA businesses and the whole UA landscape of a given city region. The proposed framework was designed to allow its integration into the CRFS (City Region Food System) toolkit developed by FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations), RUAF foundation (Resource Centres on Urban Agriculture and Food Security) and Wilfrid Laurier University., Highlights • Connection of several biological and chemical food safety risks to UA techniques. • Identifiable food safety risk factors for diverse UA practices. • Framework for the assessment of food safety levels of UA initiatives. • Development of a risk-based assessment that can be integrated into the FAO CRFS framework.

Throughout history, urban agriculture practitioners have adapted to various challenges by continuing to provide food and social benefits. Urban gardens and farms have also responded to sudden political, economic, ecological, and social crises: wartime food shortages;urban disinvestment and property abandonment;earthquakes and floods;climate-change induced weather events;and global economic disruptions. This paper examines the effects on, and responses by, urban farms and gardens to the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper is based on data collected in the summer of 2020 at the onset of the pandemic when cities were struggling with appropriate responses to curb its spread. It builds on an international research project (FEW-meter) that developed a methodology to measure material and social benefits of urban agriculture (UA) in five countries (France, Germany, Poland, UK and USA) over two growing seasons, from a Food-Energy-Water nexus perspective. We surveyed project partners to ascertain the effects of COVID-19 on those gardens and farms and we interviewed policy stakeholders in each country to investigate the wider impacts of the pandemic on UA. We report the results with respect to five key areas: (1) garden accessibility and service provision during the pandemic;(2) adjustments to operational arrangements;(3) effects on production;(4) support for urban farms and gardens through the pandemic;and (5) thoughts about the future of urban agriculture in the recovery period and beyond. The paper shows that the pandemic resulted in multiple challenges to gardens and farms including the loss of ability to provide support services, lost income, and reductions in output because of reduced labor supply. But COVID-19 also created several opportunities: new markets to sell food locally;more time available to gardeners to work in their allotments;and increased community cohesion as neighboring gardeners looked out for one another. By illustrating the range of challenges faced by the pandemic, and strategies to address challenges used by different farms and gardens, the paper illustrates how gardens in this pandemic have adapted to become more resilient and suggests lessons for pandemic recovery and longer-term planning to enable UA to respond to future public health and other crises. © Copyright © 2021 Schoen, Blythe, Caputo, Fox-Kamper, Specht, Fargue-Lelievre, Cohen, Ponizy and Fedenczak.