Urban planning policy must do more to integrate climate change adaptation and mitigation actions
Section snippets
Climate change and the urban environment
Cities are significant contributors to climate change. They are where the majority of humans now reside and are a major source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (UN-HABITAT, 2011). Cities are increasingly experiencing the impact of climate change through extreme weather events, bushfires, flooding, storm surges and sea level rise (SLR) (IPCC, 2014), which will increase as climate change intensifies (IPCC, 2018). These direct impacts will have secondary impacts on cities, including: availability
Urban planning
Urban planning seeks to manage the use and development of land in a way that considers, confronts and resolves the conflicts between demand for growth, social equity and the environment (Campbell, 1996). There are numerous tools available to urban planners to articulate and affect the desired outcomes for cities, and these can be expressed at multiple scales. As noted by Hopkins, “a plan identifies a decision that should be made in light of other concurrent or future decisions” (Hopkins, 2001
Background information on the case study – Victoria, Australia
Australia has a federal system of government, where power is shared by a federal government and six states. There are an additional eight territories that can be self-governed or administered federally. The state of Victoria is located in the south-east corner of the Australia’s main island. It makes up just 3% of the country’s total land area (Geoscience Australia, 2020), yet is home to 26 % of the country’s population (ABS, 2019a). The majority of the state’s 6.5 million residents live in the
Climate change mitigation
The results of the policy evaluation can be found in Table 4. Looking at mitigation across policy documents analysed (Table 4), seven of the twelve policy documents explicitly mention mitigation. Of these, five documents specify targets in line with the Paris Agreement. Mitigation is not addressed in the P&EAct, Planning for Sea Level Rise and Flood Guidelines. Regarding the specific mitigation actions (criteria M3-M14), three are not addressed at all.
Mitigation was explicitly addressed in all
Conclusions
This analysis has provided important insights into planning for climate change in the state of Victoria, Australia, and the extent to which the need to mitigate GHG emissions and adapt to climate changes is addressed. The findings add to the limited research focused on policy to address climate change, by looking across scales of government (local and state) and disciplines (urban planning; climate change and flood management). Overall, the analysis found that the state of Victoria has
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Anna Hurlimann: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Sareh Moosavi: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Writing - review & editing. Geoffrey R. Browne: Methodology, Formal analysis, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing.
Acknowledgements
Funding for this research was provided by a Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning Strategic Research Initiative Grant 2018-2019 at the University of Melbourne, Australia.
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