A Changing Climate for Spatial Planning

In sum, the climate for spatial planning is changing. Climate protection considerations are central to the new strategy for sustainable development and the planning framework that is charged with delivering this agenda. The gradual accumulation of planning guidance across a range of arenas, including housing, regional planning, transport, flooding and renewables, to name just the most obvious examples, provides a significant basis upon which to build regional and local strategies. There is evidence that regional bodies and local authorities are beginning to integrate climate protection into these strategies, at the rhetorical level at least. However, in seeking to put climate protection into practice, spatial planning faces some key challenges that it alone cannot resolve but with which it must engage. First, the need to shift the time horizons of political decision making into the future, yet act quickly. Second, the imperative to create a more robust and specific language which can be used to promote climate protection in the face of competing demands on the planning system. Finally, the requirement to find a means of dealing with the controversies that arise from seeking to resolve a collective problem in specific places. The critical issue at stake here is one of recognizing that such concerns may reflect a broader critique of the inadequacy of the ways in which we are trying to address climate change and, indeed, of how we are defining the problem. © 2006 Taylor & Francis.