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The City Region Food Systems approach has been proposed to achieve food system resilience and nutrition security while promoting the urgent ecological transition within urban and peri-urban areas, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the great diversity of the initiatives composing City Region Food Systems in Europe poses barriers to the assessment of their integrated sustainability. Hence, the present work is developed within the EU-H2020 project Food System in European Cities (FoodE), to build a consistent sustainability scoring system that allows comparative evaluation of City Region Food System Initiatives. Adopting a Life Cycle Thinking approach, it advances on existing knowledge and past projects, taking advantage of a participatory process, with stakeholders from multidisciplinary expertise. As a result, the research designs, and tests on 100 case studies a simplified and ready-to-use scoring mechanism based on a quali-quantitative appraisal survey tool, delivering a final sustainability score on a 1-5 points scale, to get insights on the social, economic, and environmental impacts. As in line with the needs of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the outcome represents a step forward for the sustainable development and social innovation of food communities in cities and regions, providing a practical and empirical lens for improved planning and governance., Competing Interests: None., (© 2022 Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of Institution of Chemical Engineers.)

We have followed the dynamic evolution of intracellular pH and of the intracellular concentration of nucleotides (NDP, NTP), Pi and lactate in maize root tips during the course of normoxia and anoxia transition. The intracellular pH, determined from the 31P-NMR chemical shift of the cytoplasmic P1 peak, dropped from 7.5 to 6.9 during the first few minutes after anaerobiosis. It increased again, then settled to a steady-state value of 7.1-7.2, 25 min after the beginning of the anoxic treatment. Following oxygenation, the chemical shift of the cytoplasmic Pi peak drifted gradually to its initial value. The cytoplasmic pH followed an oscillatory time course which was almost identical to the time course of NTP. Intracellular lactate accumulated steadily during the first 30 min after anaerobiosis, then its intracellular concentration remained almost constant. Following oxygenation, the intracellular concentration of lactate decreased slowly. The cytoplasmic pH followed a time course which was not identical to the time course of lactate. Following hypoxia, the pH dropped to low values long before the intracellular lactate concentration reached a steady-state equilibrium. Conversely, subsequent to oxygenation, the pH returned to normal values long before lactate. These results do not agree with the statement that cytoplasmic acidification in hypoxic maize root tips is necessarily associated with lactic acid synthesis.

The effect of O(2) partial pressure on the germination and the respiration of 12 cultivated species was studied. The reciprocal of the time necessary to observe rootlet emergence in 50% of the seeds was used to approach the germination rate. The maximum germination and respiration rates were reached in most seeds at O(2) pressures close to that of air. Decreasing the O(2) pressure produced a gradual decrease of the germination rate. The seeds could be classed in two groups according to their response to low O(2) pressures. Group I includes lettuce, sunflower, radish, turnip, cabbage, flax, and soybean: at O(2) pressures close to 2 kilopascals, the germination in this group was stopped and the adenylate energy charge was lower than 0.6. Group II includes rice, wheat, maize, sorghum, and pea. The germination rate of these seeds was also gradually decreased by lowering the O(2) partial pressure but germination still occured, very slowly, at 0.1 kilopascal; the adenylate energy charge remained higher than 0.6. These differences in the germination rates and adenylate energy charge values could not be explained by differences in the sensitivity of respiration to O(2).