Prospects for Rooftop Farming System Dynamics: An Action to Stimulate Water-Energy-Food Nexus Synergies toward Green Cities of Tomorrow

Angela Huang and Fi-John Chang
Additional contact information
Angela Huang: Department of Bioenvironmental Systems Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei 10617, Taiwan
Fi-John Chang: Department of Bioenvironmental Systems Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei 10617, Taiwan

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 16, 1-19

Abstract: Rooftop farming is a practical solution of smart urban agriculture to furnish diverse socio-environmental benefits and short food supply chains, especially in densely populated cities. This study aims to raise urban food security with less use of public water and energy in food production, through utilizing green water and energy for sustainable management. A system dynamics (SD) model framed across the nexus of climate, water, energy and food (WEF) sectors is developed for a rooftop farm in Taipei City of Taiwan. The urban WEF Nexus is structured to address how local weather affects water and energy utilization to grow vegetables. The SD results showed that the annual yields of sweet potato leaves achieved 9.3 kg/m 2 , at the cost of 3.8 ton/m 2 of harvested rainwater and 2.1 ton/m 2 of tap water together with 2.1 kwh/m 2 of solar photovoltaic power and 0.4 kwh/m 2 of public electricity. This study not only demonstrates that green resources show great potential to make a significant reduction in consuming urban irrigation resources for rooftop farming, but contributes to urban planning through a sustainable in situ WEF Nexus mechanism at a city scale. The WEF Nexus can manifest the rooftop farming promotion as cogent development to facilitate urban sustainability.

Keywords: Water-Energy-Food (WEF) Nexus; system dynamics model; sustainable resources; urban rooftop farming; climate suitability index; resource use efficiency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/16/9042/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/16/9042/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:16:p:9042-:d:613305

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().