# Promoting Urban Farming for Creating Sustainable Cities in Nepal
## 5 Empirical Analysis
### Results: Linear Regression Models
In areas that are in proximity to highways and district headquarters, there has been increasing human interference in the forested ecosystem. Repeated interferences have turned the forested areas into shrublands. These shrublands are often converted into urban areas (Table 5). Likewise, with the increase in land prices for urban expansion, many agricultural lands are plotted for urban built-up areas. These practices have led to the decrease in farmlands within the urban administrative territories. However, people have grown crops in their backyard, on their balcony, and in any available spaces to produce fresh agricultural products. These practices have compensated for the production on agricultural lands that were converted to built-up areas. This is why the \(\beta\)-coefficient values for independent variable agriculture for all the observed years from 2017 to 2021 were positive, with high t-values and \(p\)-values lower than 0.00001 (Appendix A). Both agricultural land and urban areas have similar trends in their expansion, albeit at different proportions. We argue that, despite a decrease in physical agricultural areas, increasing greenery in open urban spaces, including vertical and horizontal farming, has given false an impression that urban agriculture has not decreased and there are positive correlations between urban land and agricultural lands (Figure 11). These trends indicate that urban farming has become a practice in Nepal (Figure 9a,b), especially after the interrupted supply chain due to COVID-19. Figure 10: Relationship between urban growth and agricultural areas in Nepali urban territories [22; 24]. Figure 11: Relationships between urban area (Y-axis) and agricultural land (X-axis) within the urban boundaries in (**a**) 2017, (**b**) 2018, (**c**) 2019, (**d**) 2020, and (**e**) 2021. Each year, there is a positive relationship between the urban area and urban agricultural land. Though a lot of traditional agricultural land has been converted into built-up areas, the overall greenery areas within the urban boundaries are also increasing in all years because of the farming practices within urban areas. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{l c c c c c} \hline \hline
**Description** & **2017** & **2018** & **2019** & **2020** & **2021** \\ \hline Household & 3,179,501 & 3,223,011 & 3,269,769 & 3,317,878 & 3,568,461 \\ \hline Population & 14,885,696 & 15,081,759 & 15,300,557 & 15,525,679 & 16,698,585 \\ \hline Urban & 245,862 & 264,399 & 283,380 & 319,366 & 314,403 \\ \hline Agriculture & 956,929 & 945,631 & 947,128 & 914,173 & 891,844 \\ \hline Forest & 2,198,796 & 2,124,194 & 2,086,774 & 2,211,531 & 2,122,948 \\ \hline Shrub & 887,922 & 966,543 & 978,629 & 840,674 & 959,362 \\ \hline Water & 37,317 & 33,195 & 33,376 & 38,715 & 38,027 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 5: Number of total households, total population, urban, agriculture, forest, and shrubland in Nepal. These activities are confined within the urban territories. Households and population (people) are in number; urban, agriculture, forest, and shrubland are in hectares. These figures come from Census Bureau of Statistics of Nepal (2021) [49], analysis of satellite images for 2017 to 2021 [22; 24]. Nepal was rapidly urbanized, but, still, many urban areas have rural characters. We focused our analysis on 2017 to 2021 because, after the state restructuration of Nepal, along with the implementation of constitution of 2015, many Nepali rural areas were classified as urban despite their rural characteristics. Thus, we took the base year as 2017 to conduct this analysis. Unfortunately, we could not find data for 2022, and we excluded the year 2022 from the analysis and limited our analysis to the years 2017 to 2021.