Urban agriculture and environmental sustainability

Urban agriculture (UA) can be deployed as a strategy to ensure sustainability in pursuit of building a resilient city. The objective of this study is to investigate what and how UA contributes to environmental sustainability (ES) thereby to the building of a resilient city. Scholarly search engines such as Elsevier, Google Scholar, Science Direct, Springer and Taylor & Francis were used to retrieving articles of interest. The findings revealed that UA has immensely contributed to urban environmental sustainability through mitigating greenhouse gas, mitigating urban heat island effect, controlling flood, enhancing biodiversity, promoting agro-tourism and generating technologies contributing to addressing urban land allocation challenges for UA. UA is a solution to curb rising key urban ES issues. However, challenges such as lack of policy support, exclusion to include in urban land use planning and/or replacing it with other land use types and urbanites’ behavior toward the choice of its agricultural products are determinants to enjoy the full benefits of UA. Therefore, implementing UA as a strategy to ensure ES at this very high time of global climate change is time to harvest its multiple benefits. Policy support is a key tool for the success of UA as well as making a competent urban land user.