URBAG presentation at the Industrial Ecology Gordon Research Conference

Gara Villalba gave a talk on “Urban Green Infrastructures: Opportunities for Circularity of Resources and Resilience” in which she discussed the work done by the URBAG project, more specifically on energy-water-nutrients nexus of peri-urban agriculture using the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona as a case study. There were three key messages: 1) peri-urban agriculture can act as a cooling belt for the urban area, reducing temperatures by more than 1.5ºC during hot summer days; 2) regionalized factors for life cycle assessment are necessary for understanding the impacts of circularity- here we find that fresh water eutrophication for the Barcelona region is not a significant impact, but that P needs to be recycled because it is a depleting resource and non-substitutable; 3) a mapping of water irrigation needs and crop production is useful to understand which areas of urban agriculture are hotspots in terms of inefficient use of water and damaging ecological status of basins. For more information on the conference, please visit https://www.grc.org/industrial-ecology-conference/2022/