Building Urban Resilience Assessing Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture in Tamale, Ghana
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Date
2014
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Journal ISSN
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United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)
Abstract
Food production in and around cities is an integral part of the urban fabric in much of the
developing world. In these regions, urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) plays an important
role in diversifying urban diets and providing environmental services in urban and peri-urban areas.
As such, there is growing interest in UPA as a strategic component of urban resilience and climate
change adaptation planning. However, advocacy for UPA in this capacity is outpacing the body of
evidence regarding important stressors and drivers that act on UPA. Such knowledge is especially
critical in the developing world where urban areas are experiencing rapid growth and transformation.
In these regions, UPA is facing intensifying pressures from urban encroachment, waste disposal,
pollution, and climate change that may undermine the sector’s long-term viability.
The need to better understand these critical sustainability dimensions provided the impetus for
city-level knowledge assessments of UPA, whose main findings are contained in nine underlying
assessment reports including this one. The assessed cities were Dakar (Senegal), Tamale (Ghana),
Ibadan (Nigeria), Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), Kampala (Uganda), Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), Dhaka
(Bangladesh), Kathmandu (Nepal) and Chennai (India). All of the reports and the synthesis report
can be found at http://start.org/programs/upa. The assessments were conducted in 2012, with initial
stakeholder engagement beginning in 2011. The assessments were led by city-based teams, the
composition of which varied, with some of the teams being comprised predominately of researchers
and other teams comprising of a mix of researchers, city officials and urban NGO representatives.
The assessments seek to better understand the changing nature of UPA systems, and the critical interactions
at the land-water-climate nexus that influence resilience of UPA in rapidly growing developing-country
cities. The audience for these assessments includes national and city-level policymakers, sectoral experts
and city planners, the research community, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that interface
with urban farmers and other actors within the broader UPA sector.
The UPA assessments are part of a larger project on strengthening understanding of critical links
between climate change and development planning in West Africa, East Africa and South Asia.
The premise for the project is that progress towards undertaking effective action to address climate
change risks in these regions is hindered by low levels of awareness of global climate change, lack of
understanding of the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other
sources of scientific information, lack of location and sector specific knowledge, and the need for
strengthening capacities to undertake integrated assessments that support decision making. This
multi-year project has been a collaborative effort between the World Meteorological Organization
(WMO), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), START, the University of Ghana,
the University of Dar es Salaam, and the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies (BCAS).
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Citation
Gyasi, E.A., M. Fosu, G. Kranjac-Berisavljevic, A.M. Mensah, F. Obeng, G.A.B. Yiran and I. Fuseini. (2014). Building Urban Resilience: Assessing Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture in Tamale, Ghana. [Padgham, J. and J. Jabbour (eds.)]. United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Nairobi, Kenya.