Building Urban Resilience Assessing Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture in Tamale, Ghana

Food production in and around cities is an integral part of the urban fabric in much of the developing world. In these regions, urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) plays an important role in diversifying urban diets and providing environmental services in urban and peri-urban areas. As such, there is growing interest in UPA as a strategic component of urban resilience and climate change adaptation planning. However, advocacy for UPA in this capacity is outpacing the body of evidence regarding important stressors and drivers that act on UPA. Such knowledge is especially critical in the developing world where urban areas are experiencing rapid growth and transformation. In these regions, UPA is facing intensifying pressures from urban encroachment, waste disposal, pollution, and climate change that may undermine the sector’s long-term viability. The need to better understand these critical sustainability dimensions provided the impetus for city-level knowledge assessments of UPA, whose main findings are contained in nine underlying assessment reports including this one. The assessed cities were Dakar (Senegal), Tamale (Ghana), Ibadan (Nigeria), Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), Kampala (Uganda), Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), Dhaka (Bangladesh), Kathmandu (Nepal) and Chennai (India). All of the reports and the synthesis report can be found at http://start.org/programs/upa. The assessments were conducted in 2012, with initial stakeholder engagement beginning in 2011. The assessments were led by city-based teams, the composition of which varied, with some of the teams being comprised predominately of researchers and other teams comprising of a mix of researchers, city officials and urban NGO representatives. The assessments seek to better understand the changing nature of UPA systems, and the critical interactions at the land-water-climate nexus that influence resilience of UPA in rapidly growing developing-country cities. The audience for these assessments includes national and city-level policymakers, sectoral experts and city planners, the research community, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that interface with urban farmers and other actors within the broader UPA sector. The UPA assessments are part of a larger project on strengthening understanding of critical links between climate change and development planning in West Africa, East Africa and South Asia. The premise for the project is that progress towards undertaking effective action to address climate change risks in these regions is hindered by low levels of awareness of global climate change, lack of understanding of the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other sources of scientific information, lack of location and sector specific knowledge, and the need for strengthening capacities to undertake integrated assessments that support decision making. This multi-year project has been a collaborative effort between the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), START, the University of Ghana, the University of Dar es Salaam, and the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies (BCAS).

Source: UG