Its predicted that for every 1 °C increase in atmospheric temperature, 10% of the land where we grow crops will be lost. [8] There needs to be a paradigm shift in the way we are addressing the issues facing the agricultural industry. Governments and local authorities are responsible for providing and upholding essential services for its citizens, this especially poignant for the provision of food and protection of farmland.

The effects of climate change are becoming more noticeable as time progresses; we are losing staggering amounts of valuable farmland due to mass flooding, freak weather events, soil erosion, infectious diseases and deforestation. Over the next 50 years, farming is going to become even more marginalised [9].

One way of protecting our crops and the land we use for agriculture is by growing within controlled, contained environments. Growing indoors is already a well-established practice; greenhouses are widely used and guarantee a safer, and more established method of growing all year round. There are many benefits of applying the contained, controlled environments found in greenhouses into urban spaces, these include;

• Providing Newcastle with fresh produce all year round.
• Reducing the carbon footprint of crop production due to reduced food millage.
• No agricultural run-off.
• Limited need for pesticides and fertilisers.
• Safer crops as there is less risk of contamination.
• Reduced spoilage because of shorter transportation times and reduced handling.

With developing technologies in the field of sustainable energy, it could one day be possible to engineer contained growth systems that are self-sustaining regarding its energy usage. By carefully controlling the parameters within these environments, we can emulate perfect surroundings that allow the crops to grow to their full potential, maximising yield.

We are attempting to use a system like this in our project. We are taking a global issue and trying to implement it at a local scale. Newcastle City council has recently declared their bold plans to convert Newcastle into a ‘Smart City.’ Looking into the proposed scenarios, we saw an opportunity to propose a ‘sustainable agriculture’ scenario.

We have researched into areas of the city where we feel space is being underutilised, areas in which a sustainable food source would be most effective. After looking into the urban agriculture industry and communicating with stakeholders, we found a space that gives access to locations across the city. Newcastle’s Victoria Tunnel; they are a disused network of tunnels that were once used to transport coal from the river to locations across the city. They run beneath a variety of urban hubs that would benefit from fresh produce including: Newcastle University, Northumbria University, Royal Victoria Hospital, Student villages and Business centres. We have put together a theoretical design project that outlines how we many implement this idea into Newcastle.

Sustainability is a topic of increasing concern in the fields of agriculture, food security and rural development. There is a dire need for innovation in this field; primarily driven by predictions of substantial global population increase coupled with severe pressure on non-renewable resources. The result is a necessity to increase food production whilst reducing our impact on the environment. As such, our aim is to find sustainable solutions that address some of these issues.

Inorganic nitrogen fertiliser production is extremely energy-intensive, accounting for ~1 % of all global energy use (Smith 2002 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/297/5587/1654.long ). These fertilisers require persistent application as they are rapidly leeched out of the soil shortly after application causing mass pollution worldwide.

The problems with inorganic fertilisers are that they do not last long, they take masses of energy to produce and cause pollution, the most common fertilisers are Nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, the Newcastle 2018 team aim to provide a source of these nutrients that is sustainable and non-polluting.