The Urban Food Systems Index
What is the Urban Food Systems Index or UFSI?
The USFI is comprehensive economic framework that measures the hard-to-capature value of an urban, community garden and translates it into a single metric that can be used in a variety of important ways that support sustainability and resilience in the face of climate disasters.
What are the Core Components of the UFSI?
- Direct Food Provision
- Environmental Impact
- Social and Cultural Capital
- Health and Wellness Benefits
- Other Economic Benefits
What are the applications of the UFSI?
- Budget Allocation
- Present compelling economic cases for federal and state funding
- Risk Assessment
- Identify most vulnerable urban food systems
- Resilience Building
- Target investments in high-value, high-risk locations
- Recovery Planning
- Establish pre-disaster restoration protocols and funding mechanisms
- Community Preparedness:
- Engage communities in resilience planning using quantified data
How can the UFSI Metric be used in municipal policy and planning?
- Establish Urban Agriculture Protection Zones
- Designate high-UFSI areas for enhanced climate protection measures.
- Create Disaster Recovery Funds
- Pre-allocate resources based on quantified potential losses.
- Integrate UFSI into Environmental Impact Assessments
- Require UFSI analysis for development projects affecting urban agriculture.
- Develop Insurance Products
- Create specialized coverage for urban agriculture based on UFSI valuations.
- Fund Resilience Infrastructure
- Invest in fire breaks, flood protection, and climate controlled growing facilities for high-value sites.
What are the Global and National Implications of the UFSI?
A Global Food Source
Climate Disaster and Urban Agriculture
“When you’re talking about local food security, Altadena was a total outlier in LA county for what it was able to do for its community. There were many official and unofficial pathways to exchanging food.”
- Anna Rose Hopkins, co-founder and executive director of Farm2People (full article linked)
The Challenge of Quantifying the Loss of a Community Garden
Planning for Climate Disaster at the Muncipal Level
Urban agriculture represents a critical infrastructure for food security, community resilience, and environmental sustainability in cities worldwide. Yet, when climate disasters strike, including fires, floods, or extreme heat events, the complex economic and social value of these gardens is not yet well understood in quantifiable terms.
This gap in quantitative measurement frameworks leaves urban food system inadequately protected, leading to the risk of increased impact to the most vulnerable populations in the event of a climate disaster.
The recent loss of the Altadena Community Garden (2025), providing fresh produce to food-insecure families since the 1970's, illustrates the ways in which urban agriculture systems are not adequately accounted for in municipal economic models.
As the Altadena community remediates its garden, there is an opportunity to capture data about the multifactorial impact of urban agriculture and use it to better protect these community resources in the future.
Yet, even if the data becomes available, current economic frameworks lack the ability to adequately assess the loss of a community garden since, in addition to providing food, community gardens also create better health outcomes, improved air and soil quality, and provide other economic benefits that are each significant, but currently not easily measured with a single metric score.
The Urban Food Systems Index (UFSI) serves to translate the complex value of a community garden into a single number, with the goal of more informed stewardship of this community resource at the municipal level.
Using the UFSI, policy makers may choose specific metrics that inform their city's specific goals and then rank them in order of importance. The resulting number, which takes into account the hidden value of the community garden, allows for more effective planning in the event of a climate emergency.
