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0 Phil Fung is the active Executive Director at the Nature Harmony Foundation, and we had the honour of having him speak in our webinar in May 2021.
Nature Harmony is a non-profit organization located in Markham, Ontario, focusing on facilitating and empowering effective stewardship of the earth. They do so by rethinking relationships with nature to mobilize sustainable initiatives.
“If I can help people to appreciate nature, more people will work with nature and more people will protect nature”
Phil Fung
Nature Harmony is a community-based organization and seeks to reduce the rising food scarcity and homelessness in GTA, which is why they focus on developing indoor food systems and teaching people how to grow indoors. Below are snippets of information obtained from the webinar.
Three common facets contribute to Food Security: availability, access, and utilization. Availability pertains to the presence of food supplies in a region; access relates to the ability for individuals to obtain the available food; lastly, utilization refers to the sufficient knowledge of dietary quality and using food efficiently.
Generally, we recognize agriculture as a space-intensive practice, and as a result, we import much of the food available in metropolitan communities. However, as societies develop and cities expand, where will the farmers grow the food? One standard option to reduce the reliance on food imports in cities is urban agriculture.
Urban agriculture is food grown in an urban environment that supplements food availability and increases food security as it allows for reduced reliance on imported foods. Furthermore, it is more environmentally friendly as it requires less land and reduced emissions allocated through transportation/ distribution.
Phil Fung and Nature Harmony have developed a vertical Indoor Garden (VIGA), a nature-inspired food growing system suitable for urban agriculture. The design of the VIGA has three levels, a pond, engineered wetland, and aquaponic farm. This design takes advantage of the complementary needs of fish and plants.
If you would like to watch the entire webinar, we have provided a link below.
You can check out recordings of our other sustainability webinars at https://www.environfocus.com/environfocusknowledge/webinar-series-recordings/ or click HERE.
- Water is Life – Operation Mmiri, An ESG Project - November 10, 2022
- Synertium – Providing Sustainability Project Management Services - November 7, 2022
- Lunch & Learn Series: Demystifying ESG & Sustainability - October 7, 2022
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