Developing a Design-Led Approach for the Food-Energy-Water Nexus in Cities

Urban communities are particularly vulnerable to the future demand for food, energy and water, and this vulnerability is further exacerbated by the onset of climate change at local. Solutions need to be found in urban spaces. This article based around urban design practice sees urban agriculture as a key facilitator of nexus thinking, needing water and energy to be productive. Working directly with Urban Living Labs, the project team will co-design new food futures through the moveablenexus, a participatory design support platform to mobilize natural and social resources by integrating multi-disciplinary knowledge and technology. The moveable nexus is co-developed incrementally through a series of design workshops moving around living labs with the engagement of stakeholders. The methodology and the platform will be shared outside the teams so that the knowledge can be mobilized locally and globally

Walkability Assessment of Elderly People in Collective Relocation after the Great East Japan Earthquake – a Case Study in Kesennuma City, Japan

Ten years have passed since the Great East Japan Earthquake, and collective relocation has been completed in the tsunami-affected areas. While collective relocation has ensured safety from the tsunami, the lives of elderly residents after relocation are expected to change drastically due to the distance from the highly convenient coastal areas. This paper clarifies how, in the midst of population decline and aging community, the collective relocation to areas with rugged terrain had an impact on the living conditions of elderly residents, particularly regarding daily movement on foot, and how these conditions have changed since the collective relocation. Specifically, the amount of walking load from each collective relocation complex to the nearest living facilities was calculated for the 5th and 10th year after the earthquake. The analysis revealed that while an increasing number of complexes improved their walking accessibility due to the increase in local living facilities, 15 of the 103 complexes in Kesennuma City required a very large amount of physical effort to reach all living facilities

Early warning system for pastoral herders to reduce disaster risk by using a mobile SMS service

Includes bibliographical references.Presented at the Building resilience of Mongolian rangelands: a trans-disciplinary research conference held on June 9-10, 2015 in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.Herders in Mongolia are directly affected by climate change impact more than urban residents. This research project is developing an early warning system to prevent disaster risk by using mobile SMS services based on the partnership between a scientific research group, local policy makers, industrial technology developers and support of pastoral communities. The mobile message based forecasting system has included common weather information, forage information and other local requested information and been delivered in current time since August 2013 in a case study in Biger soum of Gobi-Altai province, Mongolia. After the system had been implemented 98% of participants agreed they had improved knowledge about adaptation to dzuds, understood the importance of information access, found it was manageable for their daily job and believed it would help reduce impacts of climate disasters

Portable Fog Gateways for Resilient Sensors Data Aggregation in Internet-less Environment

Fog computing is gaining attention due to the potential of aggregating and processing time-sensitive data at the nearby intelligent gateways. It reduces the latency of sensors data aggregation and response time therefore, improve real-time action which is beneficial in environmental monitoring and early warning systems. However, deploying edge computing in Internet-less environment seems unpractical and the mobility of gateways is less focused in current literature. In this paper, we present a practical design of a portable gateways scheme for sensors data aggregation and processing in Internet-less environment. The proposed gateways can locate their geographical locations which can be automatically converted into location names at the central gateway. The proposed portable Fog Gateways are developed by using open-source hardware and integrated with Cloud database for data storage. Data processing techniques such as data parsing and Reverse Geocoding are conducted for reliable data transmission by using GSM/GPRS technology and geographical location name detection respectively. Finally, a case study has been conducted to evaluate the feasibility of our proposed Fog Gateways scheme in real-time application

Using Environmental Input-Output Analysis to Assess Energy, Water and CO2 Emissions in Tokyo’s Food System

The sustainability of Tokyo relies on a big food supply chain to meet the huge demands of a population of 14 million people. The production of food consumes enormous amounts of water and energy along with producing the accompanying vast amount of CO2 emissions. Excessive emissions create serious downward pressure on reaching the goal of being a carbon-neutral society by 2050. In order to relieve this pressure, it is required to first evaluate the CO2 emissions quantitatively and then identify the main emitters exactly. Most of the previous studies focused on the emissions by industrial sectors, ignoring nexus effects across sectors. They also ignored the contribution of carbon emissions in the entire food supply chain, from supply industries to final consumption. This paper aims to develop a framework to visualize direct and indirect resource consumption and emissions in the food system, from food supply to food demand, and identity the key nodes and paths to achieve reduction targets using input-output tables at different scales. First, we define the elements in the food nexus system and establish the relationships among elements, in which the supply-side includes agriculture, animal husbandry, fisheries, and food manufacturing, while the demand-side includes food wholesale and retail, catering, and households. Then by using a monetary input-output table compiled from the statistics from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, direct and indirect resource utilization and emissions are calculated to identify the sources of environmental stress through combining environmentally-extended input-output analysis and energy-water-CO2 flow analysis. Finally, the reduction targets could be allocated to specific sectors and districts according to the results of emissions at different scales. The results show that the manufacturing and services sectors played the top roles of direct and indirect energy consumption and carbon emission, with manufacturing as the largest embodied energy consumer and CO2 emitter, and services as the largest direct and embodied water user. These results indicate that the Tokyo Metropolitan Government could provide more measures on energy conservation and reduction in manufacturing and services. In addition, government should promote the wide use of zero emission vehicles to reduce emissions in transportation. It was found that the food system emits 10.73% of total CO2 emissions and the embodied resource consumption and carbon emissions triggered by households is nearly a quarter of total embodied household consumption and emissions. Also, more than 80% of direct consumption and emissions comes from food demand. For embodied energy and CO2 emissions, the main sectors with a strong correlation effect were manufacturing–services, manufacturing–transport/post, and services–transport/post, while manufacturing–services, telecommunication–services, and services–telecommunications were the major sectors for embodied water use. These sector pairs are the key paths for formulating energy conservation, water saving, and reduction measures. Our findings show that the food-energy-water (FEW) system is a significant contributor of CO2 emissions in Tokyo. Thinking and acting on the FEW nexus across sectors could help the government to roll out its “Zero Emission Tokyo Strategy 2050” more effectively

Performance of Urban Agriculture in Tokyo: a Geospatial Perspective of the Food-Water-Energy Nexus

Urban agriculture plays a role in modern food systems to reduce transportation energy, improve local production for local consumption, and so on. However, the demand for local food, the supply of farmland, and even the attitudes of farmers may vary with the process of urbanization as well as the urban structure of cities. This is significant particularly in Asian megacities such as Tokyo, where the built-up areas have mostly spread to suburbs along rail lines and expanded outward from train stations on topographic and historical fundamentals. Furthermore, urban agriculture in Tokyo is facing strong pressure from urban development, the aging of farmers, and depopulation. Few previous studies have discussed the performance of urban agriculture in a megalopolis like Tokyo based on detailed evidence. The aim of this study was to clarify the relationship of food, water and energy in Tokyo through input-output analysis ofresource use and vegetable production. We created a database of water and energy resource inputsfor greenhouses, fertilizers, and pesticides, etc., for farming and vegetable production. We quantitatively calculated the input-output efficiency of energy and water resources per unit of food production in the Tokyo metropolitan area and visualized regional characteristics by hierarchical cluster analysis. We found that Tokyo produced 75,566t of vegetables per year, or an average of about 5.5kg per capita for its 13.8 million population, with 426.1TJ of energy consumed,especially in greenhouses and manufacturing compost, and 8.7 ML of water, especially in manufacturing phosphorus fertilizer. With cluster analysis identified four types of urban agriculture in terms of environmental load: “lowenvironmental load,”“medium environmentalload,”“highwaterload,” and “highenergyload.” In summary, the closer to the CBD, the more intensive the agriculture type in the sense of environmentally burden, due to the impacts of urbanization; the central part of the Tama area, with more open space for agriculture, shows moderate consumption of energy and water; and the farmlands in western Tama far from the CBD are less intensive and often cultivated with low environmental load. These findings suggest that the conservation and promotion of urban agriculture in Tokyo should consider geospatial characteristics. As land prices rise, could become more intensive, meanwhile, with a possible transition from “low environmentalload” to “mediumenvironmental load” and from “mediumenvironmental load” to “high water load” or “high energy load” to environment. This is a challenge for urban policymakers to manage the synergistic effects and conflicts in agriculture-inclusive urban development

The package redelivery problem, convenience store solution, and the delivery desert: Case study in Aoba Ward, Yokohama

The redelivery problem occurs when a delivery service cannot deliver an item to the recipient on the first attempt, requiring one or more additional attempts. There are impacts on profit, efficiency, convenience, traffic, and the environment. In recent years, the redelivery problem in Japan has been aggravated by the growth of e-commerce, which increases delivery volumes. As a solution, many convenience stores offer courier package pickup services, but the actual net benefits are uncertain. In this industry, store locations are chosen based on profitability and subject to laws and regulations. This study developed a model to assess the accessibility of convenience stores and their possible contribution to solve the redelivery problem. We defined a "delivery desert" as area where a resident cannot access the nearest convenience store package pickup service within walking distance, and developed a model that considers physical load relative to customer age and topographic slope. We then conducted a case study in a suburban neighborhood in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area and showed that (1) about 65% of residents in the study area live in a delivery desert, (2) regulations that restrict the location of convenience stores have a very small impact on our results, and (3) the percentage of people living in a delivery desert is low for the age groups targeted by convenience stores. These findings could serve as a reference in policy discussions for solving the redelivery problem

How is an informal transport infrastructure system formed? Towards a spatially explicit conceptual model

The informal transport infrastructure is an inseparable and critical element of the transportation system in that it provides pedestrian accessibility in planned or unplanned environments. Despite this important role, the informal infrastructure is usually neglected in formal studies, plans, reports or maps. A sophisticated understanding of the different dynamics and mechanisms behind the growth process of the informal infrastructure enables the researchers and practitioners to better plan, conserve and manage open spaces in planned and unplanned environments and helps them predict and manage the growth process of the informal infrastructure in the context of historical cities or informal settlements and model the mutual impacts of infrastructure growth and settlement growth in such areas. In the absence of a holistic spatially and temporally explicit model in the context of GIScience, this research aims to offer an outlook for some of the most important driving forces and aspects of informal infrastructure formation to establish the principal background for developing a spatially explicit, cognitively plausible conceptual model for future research. In this sense, this paper presents a critical review to cover a diverse range of topics in the different disciplines of this area and discuss the theoretical issues on the informal infrastructure formation process to explore, analyze and categorize the role of various human individual and collective-level behaviors and various human and environment interactions in emerging of the self-organizing patterns in the informal infrastructure system.Other UBCNon UBCReviewedFacult