Introduction

The priority spatial planning outcomes sought by the RTPI are as follows:

• Spatial planning must help humanity, at the global to the local scales, to deliver sustainable development that enables us to live with and successfully manage and adapt to the climate change processes we have inherited and to mitigate and control the potential for additional and adverse climate change: ‘Planning to live with Climate Change’
• Wherever in the world it happens, spatial planning must provide for the needs of future generations as well as the needs of the current generation: ‘Planning for Sustainable Development’
• Wherever in the world it happens, spatial planning must provide liveable and equitable settlements, where new urbanisation is sustainable and existing urban areas are progressively adapted to enhance sustainability. This should happen in ways that ensure a more equitable distribution of access to natural resources, social and economic well-being than is the case today, whilst safeguarding and enhancing biodiversity and natural environment values: ‘Planning for Liveable and Equitable Settlements’.

Planning to live with climate change

Climate change threatens the survival of ecosystems and human civilisations. 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 impacts [1]. The UK government has enacted legislation requiring the setting of carbon budgets and accepted a target to reduce carbon emissions by 80% by 2050. Spatial planning has a key role to play in the achievement of this target, which in itself is crucial in establishing expectations for global action, and securing the innovation and markets for the new technologies and new modes of spatial organisation necessary to support it.

Conventional approaches to planning have tended to balance a range of competing factors in ways that sometimes assume they are of equivalent weight. Our need to respond to climate change suggests that these approaches cannot necessarily continue.

Where there is a challenge to the survival of human civilisations and/or ecosystems, measures to mitigate climate change should have priority over the balance that is conventionally sought between economic, social and environmental factors in planning for the specific needs and circumstances of a particular area. A challenge to survival might, for example, be defined in relation to our ability to meet international and national targets for reducing the carbon and related greenhouse gas emissions that drive global warming. Our response to it might include policies that support the delivery of new renewable energy infrastructure at the scales necessary to achieve the target, whilst also taking steps to improve the energy efficiency of transport and built form in existing urban areas. Such approaches must not over-ride the need to maintain healthy ecosystems, biodiversity, landscape and cultural values, but we must maintain these goods and deliver an effective response to climate change.

The highest priority for spatial planning action is to help humanity, at the global to the local scales, to deliver sustainable development that enables us to live with and successfully manage and adapt to the climate change processes we have inherited and to mitigate and control the potential for additional and adverse climate change.

The RTPI is committed to ensuring that planners undertake the initial education and lifelong learning necessary to provide the skills and support the innovation necessary to achieve this end. We are committed to help society plan to live with the climate change impacts that are already absorbed into our climate system and to reduce and avoid future impacts through sustainable spatial organisation and resource management.

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Planning for sustainable development

The earth and human civilisation are entering what some refer to as the ‘anthropocene era’ [2]. This is the first time in which changes to the environment due to human resource use and the production of waste materials have outpaced natural processes of environmental change and the capacity of the globe to provide the resources that we need or absorb the wastes that we produce.

In the past, many social and economic decisions were taken with little concern for the use of finite natural resources or the condition of the natural environment. As human impacts become of such significant scale, spatial planning becomes a key means of ensuring that that the effects of development on natural resources and ecosystems are properly identified and managed to ensure that the earth’s capacity to sustain future generations of human life and biodiversity is not reduced.

Spatial planners are committed to provide for the needs of future generations as well as the needs of the current generation.

Much planning and environmental legislation establishes formal duties to shape this responsibility and the RTPI will continue to work with governments to ensure strong commitments to achieve sustainable development. We are also committed to ensuring that our own members’ skills are attuned to delivering sustainable outcomes.

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Planning for liveable and equitable settlements

The world has entered an era in which the majority of its population lives in urban areas [3]. Whilst the management of rural settlements will remain critically important to the delivery of sustainable outcomes for agriculture, biodiversity and landscapes, it will be in the management of urban settlements, particularly in rapidly urbanising and developing countries, where the battle for global sustainable development will be either lost or won.

Through effective spatial planning, new urban settlements offer the prospect of providing people with access to environmentally efficient and cost effective services and infrastructures, ensuring that their demands on the natural resource base and environmental condition of the world are sustainable. On a global scale, such action can lift millions more out of poverty and disease, spreading the benefits of economic development, whilst safeguarding natural resources and biodiversity that would otherwise be lost.

Existing urban settlements pose significant challenges too. Over much of Europe and the UK we have a sustainable infrastructure deficit. Ageing energy infrastructures add to climate change impacts, as do the spatial organisation of places, designed with the assumption that rising use of private carbon fuelled transport is sustainable in economic and environmental terms. Our existing homes and businesses have far higher ecological footprints than they need to have.

Spatial planners are committed to providing liveable and equitable settlements, where new urbanisation is sustainable and existing urban areas are progressively adapted to enhance sustainability. This should happen in ways that ensure a more equitable distribution of access to natural resources, social and economic well-being than is the case today, whilst safeguarding and enhancing biodiversity and natural environment values.

This establishes an urban agenda for action at the global and local scales. Globally, the RTPI can work with partners through means such as UN Habitat and the Global Planners Network to develop spatial planning capacity wherever it is required. We can play our part through the promotion of research, education partnerships, conferences and publications to the dissemination of relevant knowledge and skills across the world. More locally, spatial planners and plans can help to reshape places in Britain and Ireland to deliver more sustainable outcomes.

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Notes

• [1] Stern Report on the Economics of Climate Change 2006, and Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC Fourth Assessment Report 2007.
• [2] Crutzen and Stoermer in International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme Newsletter 41, 2000.
• [3] The UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs identified the global urban population as 3 billion in 2004 and projects it to rise to 5 billion by 2030, rising at double the rate of the population as a whole.

Author:

Rynd Smith

Publisher:

The Royal Town Planning Institute

Date:

16-Jun-09

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