Abstract
Most cities around the world rely on long distance food supply from remote areas to feed their residents, indicating low food self-sufficiency for urban areas. As a result, urban food supply systems tend to be highly vulnerable to natural hazards and pandemics, and also have larger environmental consequences such as a high carbon footprint and a high virtual water footprint. This chapter analyses Tokyo‘s vegetable food supply system to investigate the risks of existing urban food supply systems and their impact on the environment . It argues that strengthening local production and consumption would reduce the risk of the current self-sufficiency rate for food in Tokyo falling below 1%. More local production and consumption would also bring positive results for environmental indicators such as the carbon and virtual water footprints respectively.
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This study is funded by the Japan Science and Technology (JST) under the Belmont Forum Sustainable Urbanization Global Initiative (SUGI) on Food-Water-Energy Nexus with the project reference M-NEX.
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Mitra, B.K. et al. (2021). Linking Urban Food Systems and Environmental Sustainability for Resilience of Cities: The Case of Tokyo. In: Roggema, R. (eds) TransFEWmation: Towards Design-led Food-Energy-Water Systems for Future Urbanization . Contemporary Urban Design Thinking. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61977-0_14
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