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Four steps to food security for swelling cities

Combine pockets of rural land, reduce food waste, improve farming and encourage urbanites to eat less meat, urge Baojing Gu and colleagues.
  1. Baojing Gu

    1. Baojing Gu is an ecologist in the Department of Land Management at Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China; and at the School of Agriculture and Food, University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

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  2. Xiaoling Zhang

    1. Xiaoling Zhang is associate professor in the Urban Research Group at the Department of Public Policy, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.

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  3. Xuemei Bai

    1. Xuemei Bai is professor of urban environment and human ecology at the Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.

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  4. Bojie Fu

    1. Bojie Fu is professor of landscape ecology at the Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.

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  5. Deli Chen

    1. Deli Chen is professor of soil and environment at the School of Agriculture and Food, and director of the Australia–China Joint Research Centre: Healthy Soils for Sustainable Food Production and Environmental Quality, University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

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Meat market in Hong Kong

Meat on sale in a market in Hong Kong. Credit: Malte Jaeger/laif/eyevine

As the world’s population rises, and expanding cities pave over fertile soils, it is becoming harder to produce food for everyone1–3. By 2050, more than twice as many people will live in cities as did so in 2000, and on three times as much urban land. Around 2% of the world’s best croplands will be lost, mainly in Asia and Africa, where cities are growing quickest3.

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Nature 566, 31-33 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-00407-3

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