Sustainable Urban-Rural Food Production for Ethical and Just Transitions: EMergy Assessment of a Community-Supported Agriculture Project in Italy

Global crises such as the ongoing pandemic highlight the interconnectedness and vulnerability of human systems, requiring integrated interdisciplinary studies aimed at breaking unsustainable and unjust practices. In this work, we address a horticultural co-production system, inspired by the Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) model. In a highly industrialised area of Northern Italy, with significant wild land consumption, an alternative bottom-up experience is described. Local organic farming and just labour conditions seek ecological sustainability and social equity beyond market dynamics. This CSA project contributes to the resilience of a territory currently affected by health and economic plights. Its claims, limits, and potentials are investigated by means of the Emergy Accounting Analysis (EMA). The socio-ecological inputs and the monetary flows in the system at issue are identified and quantified, partly eased by the transparent process of the target community, and some key emergy indicators are calculated. Together with systems diagramming, the EMA assessments provides fruitful insights of a single scalable project, thus offering current barrier and future opportunities for local improvement and exportability to crisis and post-crisis scenarios and/or simply ethical, sustainable transitions.