Climate change threatens our survival. Recent studies have shown that we have about 5 to 7 years to change our ways before accelerating trends in environmental degradation lead to irreversible and chaotic change that could challenge the very basis of our way of life and ability to plan. Global warming would hit us at home as well as abroad. Consequential economic change threatens our security both locally and globally. Environmental and economic changes threaten the well-being of communities, families and individuals. Social changes on a global scale will unavoidably lead to increasing deprivation amongst poorer communities and increasing social and economic polarity worldwide.

The RTPI's Climate Change Challenge: Planning to Live with Climate Change, introduces climate change to our vision for planning as an over-arching priority. It revisits the key issues of sustainable development, spatial planning, value-driven planning and action-orientated planning at the heart of the RTPI’s original New Vision for Planning. It aims to develop the original agenda for change into an Action Plan that seeks to realign the responsibilities for planning, improve the capabilities of planning, focus on the role of the 21st Century professional and identify the actions that the RTPI must take. 

Why is this important?

Since 1988, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organisation and the United Nations Environment Programme, have been conducting scientific peer reviewed mass assessments of the degree to which human activities, particularly emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases, are leading towards climate change.

Click here to view the IPCC web site and click here to  view a policymakers summary of 4AR, the most recently completed 4th Assessment Report (2007).  It concludes that:

Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global average sea level...

Global GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions due to human activities have grown since pre-industrial times, with an increase of 70% between 1970 and 2004...

Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG concentrations. It is likely that there has been significant anthropogenic warming over the past 50 years averaged over each continent (except Antarctica)...

The need for action to control greenhouse emissions on an international scale emerging from the evidence base provided by the IPCC has been recognised for some time.  The Kyoto Protocol was adopted by 184 countries including the UK in Kyoto, Japan, on 11 December 1997 and came into force on 16 February 2005.  The protocol establishes processes for climate change mitigation and adaptation, including the development of a carbon market.  It also sets domestic carbon reduction targets for signatory nations including the UK. 

Click here to access more information about the protocol.  

The protocol is drawing towards the end of its life and steps are being taken to replace it in a new international framework agreement.  However, a range of other European and domestic greenhouse gas reduction targets now bear down much more strongly on UK and Irish emissions than the protocol alone.

The European Union has set a renewable energy target of 20% by 2020.  The UK's share of this target is 15%.  The achievement of this target will require significant levels of infrastructure development.  For example, it is anticipated that installed onshore wind generation capacity will need to rise from 2GW in 2006 to 14GW by 2020.  15GW of offshore wind generating capacity will need to be installed.  Tidal, hydro, microgeneration, wave power, landfill gas, sewage gas, biomass, waste to energy plant and other renewables will all require to be brought on stream.

In 2005, the UK government commissioned then Sir Nicholas, now Lord Stern to review the economic impact of climate change. Stern concluded that the cost of short to medium term action to limit atmospheric greenhouse gasses to a level necessary to ensure that climate change did not lead to widespread damage and chaos was far outweighed by the cost of damages due to predictable climate change in the medium term, should emissions continue on a current 'business as usual' basis.  The previously common view that action to manage climate change represented a choice between environmental responsibility and economic prudence was replaced by a view that such action was the only means to deliver both and environmentally and economically prudent and sustainable future.  Stern identified that we are already exposed to significant ongoing climate change processes and that our task must be to manage and adapt to this, whilst ensuring that medium to long term execerbation of adverse effects was curtailed.  He identified spatial planning as a key means of delivering adaptation and mitigation.

Click here to view the Stern Report.

In 2008, the government established the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) to co-ordinate UK activity on this agenda.  The Energy Act 2008 and the Climate Change Act of 2008 were passed, providing the UK with legislated carbon budget requirements and a statutory climate change committee to recommend carbon targets for budgets and the actions necessary to achieve these.  A reduction of carbon emissions by 80% relative to 1990 levels by 2050 has been accepted as the statutory target.

Click here to view the DECC website, with access to the text of recent legislation.

Click here to view the Committee on Climate Change website and its report on building a low carbon UK.

DECC identify the Planning Act 2008 as a key means of ensuring the delivery of timely new low carbon infrastructure.

Measures such as the implementation of the Code for Sustainable Homes and zero carbon homes and non-domestic buildings, Merton type policies in development plans, embedded generation, combined heat and power schemes, transport demand management, and the better insulation and energy efficiency in the existing housing stock all add to the more local portfolio of measures that move alongside the major infrastructure projects that will deliver to out carbon challenge.

Where climate change effects have already been absorbed, adaptations including sustainable urban drainage, responses to changes in flood events and managed retreat from coastlines will all require to be facilitated through the planning system.

All of these changes require significant levels of energy related development and construction.  The planning system, planning policies and development management decision making must be ready to play their part.

Climate change is our priority professional challenge.

Want to read more?

Click here to return to the climate change challenge home page

Author:

Rynd Smith

Publisher:

The Royal Town Planning Institute

Date:

26-Feb-09

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