Abstract
Agriculture in the urban periphery (peri-UA) can potentially reduce its environmental impact through nutrient recovery from municipal solid and water waste, promoting local crops and displacing some dependency on imports. Shifting from linear to circular food-supply strategies should systemically consider trade-offs that depend on city-specific factors, such as crop patterns, waste management capabilities, and ecosystem status. We investigate these effects spatially and temporally with a tool based on prospective regionalized life cycle assessment to determine how the local and transboundary impacts of various strategies of nutrient circularity (such as struvite, compost, and recovered ammonium salts) applied to peri-UA areas affect climate change, regionalized marine and freshwater eutrophication, abiotic resource depletion, and water consumption, providing maps reflecting crop yields and impacts to aid urban planners. We illustrate with the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona, where we find that applying compost with current waste management infrastructure can reduce the carbon footprint of peri-UA areas by up to 85%.
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Data availability
The datasets generated and analysed during the current study are available in the URBAG-ICTA/URBAG_LCA_tool repository, https://github.com/URBAG-ICTA/URBAG_LCA_tool/tree/main.
Code availability
The underlying code for this study is available in URBAG-ICTA/URBAG_LCA_tool and can be accessed via this link https://github.com/URBAG-ICTA/URBAG_LCA_tool/tree/main.
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Acknowledgements
This work has been made possible thanks to the financial support of the ERC Consolidator Integrated System Analysis of Urban Vegetation and Agriculture (818002-URBAG) and the funding from the research and innovation programme under the H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions PROTEAN project (842460).
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Research design: A.M.B and G.V.; Code writing: A.M.B; Data collection and analysis: A.M.B, S.T-C, J.D.A.P, A.L.R.L and G.V.; Writing of manuscript: A.M.B; Supervision: G.V. All authors proof-read the final manuscript.
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Mendoza Beltran, A., Toboso-Chavero, S., Arosemena Polo, J.D. et al. Leveraging circular nutrients to improve the sustainability of peri-urban agriculture. npj Urban Sustain (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-025-00333-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-025-00333-6
