Environmental impacts and resource use of urban agriculture: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Erica Dorr, Benjamin Goldstein, Arpad Horvath, Christine Aubry, and Benoit Gabrielle Abstract Environmental merits are a common motivation for many urban agriculture (UA) projects. One powerful way of quantifying environmental impacts is with life cycle assessment (LCA): a method that estimates the environmental impacts of producing, using, and disposing of a good. LCAs of UA have proliferated in recent years, evaluating a diverse range of UA systems and generating mixed conclusions about their environmental performance. To clarify the varied literature, we performed a systematic review of LCAs of UA to answer the following questions: What is ...