Growing hope in the face of crisis - making the case for urban agriculture.

By 2050 there may be 10 billion of us with 70% living in urban concentrations. All of us will need adequate healthy food and water daily to sustain our social stability.

Urban agriculture can and must play a key role in providing these essentials, including tangible ways for people to address the climate crisis on their own patch while securing our capacity to meet most of the UN’s Sustainability Development goals this decade. It's a wicked problem indeed.

So how can we help do this in our new post-Covid reality? Not just meet our food needs but do so equitably while securing preventative health, resource limits, soil regeneration, resource recycling, and local cooling imperatives via grassroots empowerment.

Keynote speaker and internationally recognised climate scientist, soil microbiologist, and innovation strategist Walter Jehne will outline our practical capacity to do all this via wicking bag innovations and catalysing community-based urban, village agriculture, and cycling systems with 10 fold water and resource use efficiencies.

Hear about how these urban agriculture innovations can enable us to regenerate and create sovereign soil to empower and raise social equity and enterprise. With only 7 missed meals separating social stability and chaos, the capacity of urban agriculture and these innovations to avoid such chaos will have increasing existential relevance locally and globally. Let our collective experience and discussions via our forums contribute significantly to securing these outcomes

Registrations close at 5PM AEDT on 25th of May 2021.

Walter Jehne

Walter Jehne is an internationally recognised climate scientist, soil microbiologist, and innovation strategist. He has immense field and research experience in forests, grasslands, agriculture, and soils at national (CSIRO) and international (UN) levels. In addition to his science career, Walter has worked broadly with the Federal government, leading transformation in the industry. This diversity of experience has given Walter a unique and exceptional capacity to devise solutions to problems and to turn challenges into opportunities. He has a remarkable ability to explain complex science in easy-to-understand ways. Walter’s primary scientific focus is soil biology. Recently he was part of an invitation-only UN FAO conference in Paris looking at including soil science into the next IPCC report.

Find out more about Regenerate Earth.

This event is organised by Sustain.

About Sustain: The Australian Food Network

Sustain is a national food systems think and do network that co-designs and co-builds better food systems. We work collaboratively with stakeholders across government, community and business towards the transition to a food system that works for all Australians and supports flourishing communities and ecosystems.

Sustain was formed in 2015 and is based in Melbourne, with members and partners in all states and territories. Sustain’s leadership and impact is demonstrated with the multiple achievements of the ground-breaking collective impact projects Cardinia Food Circles (2016-present) and the Melbourne Food Hub (2018-present), as well as its coordination of two national Urban Agriculture Forums (2016, 2018, 2021) and an inaugural Australian Community Food Hubs conference and speaking tour (2016).