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Urban rooftops for food and energy in China

Nature Cities volume 1, pages 741–750 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Urban rooftop agriculture (RA) and photovoltaic power production (RPV) offer sustainable solutions for the food–energy nexus in cities but compete for limited rooftop space. Here we explore the potential benefits (productivity, economic and environmental) and allocation strategy of RA and RPV across 13 million buildings in 124 Chinese cities, considering urban characteristics and regional productivity. We found that RA yields superior economic benefits, while RPV excels in greenhouse gas emission reductions. Prioritizing either RA or RPV can only retain 0–29% of the above benefits brought by the other. However, allocating 61% of the flat rooftop area to RA and all the remaining (including pitched rooftops) to RPV would retain >50% of their potential, meeting 15% (mean, 0.5–99% across cities) of urban vegetable needs and 5% (0.5–27% across cities) of the electricity needs. While the productivity from RA and RPV have significant environmental and socioeconomic benefits, they require considerable water (up to 15% of urban residential water use) and materials (for example, totaling 13 kt silver).

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Fig. 1: Potential benefits in 124 cities if all productive rooftop areas were applied in either RA production or RPV.
Fig. 2: Optimal allocations of RA or RPV.

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Data availability

The vectorized urban extent and urban open space is available at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0303243421001872 (ref. 34). The GHG emission intensity used in this study is publicly available at http://lca.cityghg.com/. Data for water resource use are available from open-sourced Chinese statistics (https://www.mohurd.gov.cn/gongkai/fdzdgknr/sjfb/tjxx/jstjnj/index.html). The yield for open-air production was taken from the Global Agro-Ecological Zoning database (https://gaez.fao.org/). The SWGDN hourly data from M2T1NXRAD are publicly available at https://disc.gsfc.nasa.gov/datasets/M2T1NXRAD_5.12.4/summary, and 2 m hourly temperature data from ERA5-Land are publicly available at https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/. Due to copyright issues, other data, such as building outlines and attributes, can only be made available from the authors on request. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

The vectorized and other spatial data, the building-level of potential of vegetable and PV power production and environmental and provisioning performance were processed or quantified with Excel v2021 and Python v3.7 interpreted by ArcGIS Pro. The code for multiobjective optimization was constructed utilizing the open-source Python package pymoo v0.6.1.3 (https://pymoo.org/), which is available at https://github.com/Ruiyang/Urban-rooftops-for-food-and-energy-in-China.

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Acknowledgements

This study was financially supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (52100214), LIESMARS Special Research Funding and the Start-up Funding of Wuhan University awarded to Y.H. P.P. acknowledges funding from the European Research Council for the BeyondSDG project (project number 101077492) and the Food System Economics Commission, funded by the IKEA Foundation (grant agreement no. G-2009-01682).

Author information

Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Rui Yang, Chao Xu.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Resource and Environmental Sciences, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

    Rui Yang, Haoran Zhang, Xihong Lian, Limin Jiao & Yuanchao Hu

  2. Institute of Geography, Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Chao Xu

  3. College of Resources and Environment, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan, China

    Zhen Wang

  4. Interdisciplinary Research Center for Territorial Spatial Governance and Green Development, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan, China

    Zhen Wang

  5. Integrated Research on Energy, Environment and Society, Energy and Sustainability Research Institute Groningen, University of Groningen, Groningen, the Netherlands

    Prajal Pradhan

  6. Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Member of the Leibniz Association, Potsdam, Germany

    Prajal Pradhan & Yuanchao Hu

  7. Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia

    Xuemei Bai

  8. Key Laboratory of Urban Environment and Health, Institute of Urban Environment, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiamen, China

    Shenghui Cui & Yong-Guan Zhu

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Contributions

Y.H., R.Y. and C.X. conceived the study. R.Y., Y.H., C.X., P.P. and H.Z. developed the methodology. R.Y., Y.H. and C.X. constructed the datasets and drafted the manuscript. L.J., X.B., Z.W., P.P., S.C. and Y.-G.Z. analyzed the results and supervised the study. All authors contributed to the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Xuemei Bai or Yuanchao Hu.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Nature Cities thanks Sebastian Zainali, Perla Zambrano-Prado and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Notes 1–6, Tables 1–9, Figs. 1–8 and discussions.

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Source data

Source Data Fig. 1

Potential benefits in 124 cities if all productive rooftop areas were applied in either RA or RPV production.

Source Data Fig. 2

Optimal allocations of RA or RPV.

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Yang, R., Xu, C., Zhang, H. et al. Urban rooftops for food and energy in China. Nat Cities 1, 741–750 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-024-00127-4

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