Exploring alternative pathways toward more sustainable regional food systems by foodshed assessment – City region examples from Vienna and Bristol

Highlights

• A foodshed model assessing self-sufficiency has been applied to Vienna and Bristol.

• There, high self-sufficiency is theoretically achievable but far away from its realization.

• Regionalisation, organic farming and dietary shift are triggers of food system transformation.

• Local food policies should adopt a sustainable city-region food system based on a foodshed delimitation.

Abstract

The resilience of the food supply system has become a vital issue for many countries especially under substantial international supply disturbances (e.g. the effects of COVID-19 restrictions). Regionalizing diets and increasing food self-sufficiency contribute greatly to shortening food supply chains and, therefore, to increasing the resilience of the food system. Simultaneously, food supply disturbances can offer a chance for food system transition toward implementing sustainable management practices in agriculture (e.g. organic farming), increasing the sustainability of food production. In this study, we have proposed a foodshed for the cities of Vienna and Bristol, delineating the spatial extent for such a regionalization and self-sufficiency discussion. We used the Metropolitan Foodshed and Self-sufficiency Scenario model to assess the potential self-sufficiency of these areas under different pathways involving more sustainable and resilient food system scenarios by distinguishing: i) The regionalization, ii) production system, iii) food losses and wastage, and iv) population growth until 2050. Furthermore, we have found the main local food policies and studies involving both cities, linking them to the current self-sufficiency levels and proposing pathways to increase them. Our results suggest that the foodsheds proposed are suitable to achieve a high degree of potential self-sufficiency when shifting consumers’ behavior toward sustainably produced regional products, and reducing food wastes in households and food losses in agriculture. This should be accompanied in parallel by an increase in the diversification of regional crop production managed sustainably. We call for the adoption of the foodshed approach – based on the concept of sustainable city region food systems – so that it can be integrated into the food policies to increase food self-sufficiency sustainably.

Introduction

The interactions between the food system and the different components of the Earth have been widely studied (Alexander et al., 2016; Crippa et al., 2021; Laroche et al., 2020; Mbow et al., 2019; Ortiz et al., 2021), leading to questions about the sustainability of globalized food systems and proposing venues for addressing the trade-offs (Augustin et al., 2021; Herrero et al., 2020; Rocchi et al., 2020; Sánchez et al., 2021).

On the other hand, food self-sufficiency in food supply – generally defined as the capacity of a country to produce sufficient food to cover its own needs – is a topic known to gain increased attention in times of crises (Clapp, 2017), under the umbrella of the overarching concept of food system resilience (Puma, 2019; Savary et al., 2020). The COVID-19 crisis is a recent paradigmatic example that brought these concepts back as a hotspot in the debate on globalized food systems (Erokhin and Gao, 2020; Fan et al., 2021; Farrell et al., 2020; Fontan Sers and Mughal, 2020; Garnett et al., 2020; Guo and Tanaka, 2020; Moseley and Battersby, 2020; Nordhagen et al., 2021; Orden, 2020; Vittuari et al., 2021; Woertz, 2020).

However, food self-sufficiency is assessed on not only the country level but the regional and local level. Thus, feeding metropolitan areas through sustainable regional agricultural production has become a local policy concern in the last few years (Cardoso et al., 2017; Carey, 2011; Doernberg et al., 2019; Vicente-Vicente and Piorr, 2021; Zasada et al., 2019). The creation of resilient city region (CRFS) and local food systems (Blay-Palmer et al., 2021; Skog et al., 2018) have also increasingly resulted in the development of individual city regional food strategies (Doernberg et al., 2019).

Food self-sufficiency can be achieved by implementing policies either in agricultural production and/or food consumption. Weber et al. (2020) found that the narratives of the current literature on transitions toward sustainable food systems can be grouped into five clusters: i) Alternative food movements, ii) sustainable diets, iii) sustainable agriculture, iv) health and diverse societies, and v) food as commons. According to these authors, the sustainability concept varies between the different clusters. Thus, studies on assessing transitions to sustainable diets refer to low resource consumption with low waste and adequate nutrient intake, whereas those assessing sustainable agriculture refer to environmentally friendly production systems (e.g. organic farming, agroecology, smart farming). The sustainability impact from both sides, consumption patterns and agricultural production systems, have been widely assessed in the last decade (Birney et al., 2017; Blas et al., 2018; Chaudhary, 2019; Donati et al., 2016; Esteve-Llorens et al., 2021; Falcone et al., 2020; Hallström et al., 2018; Hyland et al., 2017; Kummu et al., 2012; Mason and Lang, 2017; Mottet et al., 2020; Röös et al., 2015; Sporchia et al., 2021; Travassos et al., 2020; Vanham et al., 2015; Vicente-Vicente and Piorr, 2020; Wang et al., 2020). Transitions toward sustainable food systems have recently been assessed at the country level in Europe (Galli et al., 2020; Kugelberg et al., 2021) and the UK (Benthem de Grave et al., 2020). Furthermore, assessments on the impact of specific initiatives, such as community-led local food initiatives, have also been carried out (Guzman and Reynolds, 2019; Nicol, 2020; Prost, 2019).

However, the majority of sustainable food transition assessments focus on the global or country scale, and the ones assessing specific interventions at the local level lack the incorporation of the regional context. The latter focus mainly on studying “local niche developments and discussing governance options for upscaling rather than actual regime change” (Melchior and Newig, 2021). Therefore, applying the concept of self-sufficiency to a regional context introduces the question of to what extent regional production can be adapted to not only the quantitative but also the dietary needs of a city region, and where the limits of such an adaptation are. Regional self-sufficiency, by contrast, has not been a focus of policy decision-making until recently (Piorr et al., 2018; Doernberg et al., 2019).

Foodshed models have gained attention among the few tools available for regional self-sufficiency planning. Briefly, they assess how much agricultural land would be needed to supply a city with food from the region. One type of foodshed approach assesses the flows (Schreiber et al., 2021) and is especially valuable to study the distribution networks (Karg et al., 2016; Moschitz and Frick, 2020; Wegerif and Wiskerke, 2017). Another type of approach is the quantitative one, assessing the production capacity of the area (Schreiber et al., 2021). The theoretical food-land footprint and the potential self-sufficiency are evaluated in capacity assessments by considering the population and current dietary patterns, farmland available, land use cover and regional yields.

The Metropolitan Foodshed and Self-sufficiency Scenario (MFSS) model (Zasada et al., 2019) uses this approach. The result is the achievement of a theoretical self-sufficiency (Vicente-Vicente et al., 2021). The MFSS and similar tools have proven to be useful for application on a regional level and to support the development of concrete urban-regional strategies (Cardoso et al., 2017; Świader et al., 2018; Zasada et al., 2019; Moschitz and Frick, 2020).

From a spatial perspective, a foodshed can be understood as the territory around a metropolitan area that is required to feed its population (Peters et al., 2009; Brinkley, 2013). The foodshed has two main features: Size and shape. While the size is directly related to the capacity of the foodshed, as described previously, the specification of the shape is more difficult. It may be relevant in contexts where administrative boundaries are to be considered because they concern responsibilities in planning. However, landscape-related features, geomorphological properties of the surrounding area, cultural and historical relationships with the nearby regions (Vicente-Vicente et al., 2021) and, finally, market and supply chain organization may also make it necessary to consider the shape of the entire foodshed or subunits, for example, for different product groups. Foodshed models such as the MFSS can additionally be used as a tool to assess the feasibility of specific policies (Tavakoli-Hashjini et al., 2020).

The ambition of this research is to use the MFSS model as the basis for the policy debate on pathways towards a sustainable CRFS transformation. Specifically, what future diets should be, what management practices are suitable or how consumers’ behaviour affect the land footprint. We chose two case studies: Vienna, where this assessment represents the first proposing a foodshed, and Bristol, where the study uses insights from previous studies to improve the reliability of the foodshed assessment.

The objectives of this study are fourfold: i) To carry out a foodshed analysis for two cities with different land uses, population distribution and geomorphological features; ii) to demonstrate the capabilities of the MFSS model for scenario modelling regarding system change toward more sustainable diets via four pathways (i.e. regionalization, organic farming, reduction of food losses and waste, and population growth); iii) to discuss capabilities and concrete research outputs of the MFSS model in the context of the emerging local sustainable development food policies; and iv) to suggest specific pathways to increase the resilience of the food system.