A Systematic Literature Review on Controlled-Environment Agriculture: How Vertical Farms and Greenhouses Can Influence the Sustainability and Footprint of Urban Microclimate with Local Food Production

作者：Christos Vatistas, Dafni Despoina Avgoustaki, Thomas Bartzanas · 发表于：Atmosphere · 年份：2022 · DOI：10.3390/atmos13081258 · 被引用次数：156 · 研究领域：Greenhouse Technology and Climate Control、Light effects on plants、Urban Agriculture and Sustainability

The rapidly growing population and increasing urbanization have created the need to produce more food and transport it safely to urban areas where the majority of global consumers live. Open-field agriculture and food distribution systems have a lot of food waste, and, in parallel, the largest percentage of available arable land is already occupied. In most cases, food produced by compatible agricultural methods needs to be frozen and travel several miles until it reaches the consumer, with high amounts of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions produced by this process, making it an unsustainable method with huge amounts of CO2 emissions related with fresh food products. This research contains an extensive literature review based on 165 international publications (from 2006–2022) describing and analyzing the efficiency and impact of controlled-environment agriculture (CEA) methods, and more precisely, greenhouses (GHs) and vertical farms (VFs), in the environmental footprint of food production and consumption. Based on various publications, we could draw the conclusion that VFs could highly influence a greener transition to the sustainability of urban consumption with reduced CO2 emissions sourcing from food transportation and limited post-harvest processes. However, there is a significant demand for further energy efficiency, specifically when it comes to artificial lighting operations inside VFs. A large-scale implementation of VFs that operate with renewable energy sources (RES) c...