Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience in Urban Agriculture

Urban agriculture is emerging as a critical field of study in the context of global food security, especially as cities worldwide face the escalating challenges posed by climate change. Urban centers across both the Global South and North including rapidly urbanizing regions in Latin America and the Caribbean and across Asia are increasingly exposed to the impacts of extreme weather events, pollution, and shifting climatic patterns. These stressors threaten the stability of urban food production and reveal persistent gaps in local adaptation capacities. While current research has highlighted the promise of urban agriculture in fostering sustainable food systems, significant questions remain regarding its ability to serve vulnerable populations such as women, children, the elderly, and those living with disabilities amid diverse cultural and socioeconomic contexts. Furthermore, many studies focus narrowly on individual cities or regions, limiting understanding of how adaptation and resilience strategies can be transferred or scaled globally. There is a notable scarcity of insights into the effectiveness of these interventions from the perspectives of policymakers, urban farmers, businesses, and local communities, particularly in underrepresented areas like Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia, which face distinct governance and climatic challenges. To address global food security and sustainable urban transformation, a broader and more comparative empirical base is urgently needed.

This Research Topic aims to advance the understanding of climate change adaptation and resilience in urban agriculture, with a deliberate emphasis on cross-regional diversity and real-world applicability. The main objective is to bring together empirical research and critical reviews that investigate innovative strategies, policies, participatory frameworks, and technological solutions enabling urban farmers to adapt to changing climate conditions. By explicitly inviting contributions that span global regions including Africa, Europe, North America, Oceania, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Asia this topic seeks to uncover both universal challenges and locally specific pathways for building resilient urban food systems. Key questions include: Which adaptation strategies most effectively safeguard food security across different urban environments? How do local governance, indigenous knowledge, and multi-actor collaboration contribute to sustained agricultural resilience? What contextual barriers and opportunities shape urban adaptation efforts in diverse world regions?

The scope of this Research Topic covers a wide array of regions, perspectives, and research methodologies, while focusing on strategies that tangibly strengthen the climate resilience of urban food production systems. Limitations include a central emphasis on adaptation at the city scale and the evaluation of the efficacy, transferability, and inclusivity of resilience-building interventions. To promote a genuinely global conversation and facilitate cross-regional learning, we invite articles addressing the following themes:

• Innovative methods and practices for climate adaptation by urban farmers
• Case studies of successful resilience strategies in urban settings across Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and other regions
• Participatory, community-driven approaches and multi-stakeholder collaboration in adaptation
• The integration of indigenous knowledge and socio-technical innovations for agricultural resilience
• Impacts and responses to climate variability and extreme events on urban food production
• Role of policy frameworks, governance, and planning in enabling resilient urban agriculture
• Incorporation of urban farming into climate action strategies and municipal development plans
• Potential and challenges of urban agriculture in contributing to climate mitigation
• Behavioural and decision-making factors among different groups of urban farmers
• Case studies of successful resilience strategies in urban settings across Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and other regions

Empirical research, systematic reviews, case studies, policy analyses, and interdisciplinary perspectives are invited. This explicitly global scope ensures broad representation and comparative insight, so submissions from any world region including Latin America and the Caribbean as well as Asian cities are strongly encouraged.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Review
• Systematic Review

Keywords: Urban Agriculture. Climate Adaptation. Resilience Strategies. Food Security. Participatory governance. Socio-technical systems. Vertical farming. Policy frameworks. Global South

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.