Global assessment of urban and peri-urban agriculture: irrigated and rainfed croplands
By A. Thebo, P. Drechsel, Eric F. Lambin. 2014
238 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The role of urban agriculture in global food security is a topic of increasing discussion. Existing research on urban and peri-urban agriculture consists largely of case studies that frequently use disparate definitions of urban and peri-urban agriculture depending on the local context and study objectives. This lack of consistency makes quantification of the extent of this practice at the global scale difficult. This study instead integrates global data on croplands and urban extents using spatial overlay analysis to estimate the global area of urban and peri-urban irrigated and rainfed croplands. The global area of urban irrigated croplands was estimated at about 24 Mha (11.0 percent of all irrigated croplands) with a cropping intensity of 1.48. The global area of urban rainfed croplands found was approximately 44 Mha (4.7 percent of all rainfed croplands) with a cropping intensity of 1.03. These values were derived from the MIRCA2000 Maximum Monthly Cropped Area Grids for irrigated and rainfed crops and therefore their sum does not necessarily represent the total urban cropland area when the maximum extent of irrigated and rainfed croplands occurs in different months. Further analysis of croplands within 20 km of urban extents show that 60 and 35 percent of, respectively, all irrigated and rainfed croplands fall within this distance range.
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Plant Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/435ca92de4bc06e0e5defd822dfc89515fb71d72
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In Global and Planetary Change
- Karen C. Seto
- Burak Güneralp
- K. Erb
- G. Woodward
- S. Potts
- John M. Holland
- Steven P. Loheide II
- Christopher J. Kucharik
In Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis
In Plant Science
- J. Ollerton
- John M. Holland
- J. Osborne
- K. Erb
- G. Woodward
- S. Potts
- Christopher J. Kucharik
- Philip A. Townsend
Citations in the corpus
- Features and Functions of Multifunctional Urban Agriculture in the Global North: A Review (2020, background): “Land Access Today, in developed countries about 20% of the global irrigated cropland is located in cities or within 20 km from the urban centers, where also 44% of the global rainfed agriculture occurs (Thebo et al., 2014).”
- Future urban land expansion and implications for global croplands (2016, background): “More than 60% of the world’s irrigated croplands are located near urban areas (6), highlighting the potential competition for land between agricultural and urban uses.”
- Protecting an ecosystem service: approaches to understanding and mitigating threats to wild insect pollinators (2016, background): “1237 The growing of food in cities has increased dramatically in recent times; worldwide, urban 1238 agriculture involves an estimated 100 million people (Eigenbrod and Gruda, 2015), covers an 1239 area of at least 68 million hectares, and accounts for around 16% of lands devoted to crops 1240 (Theb”
- Urban heat island impacts on plant phenology: intra-urban variability and response to land cover (2016, background): “…in GSL have direct impacts on global food security, as 25%–30% of global urban residents, most commonly from the poorest sectors of the population, are involved in food production and 60% of irrigated agriculture (35% rainfed) is within 20 km of urban areas (Orsini et al 2013, Thebo et al 2014).”