Land Use Strategy (LUS) Delivery Evaluation Project : Volume 1: Main Report

Scotland’s first Land Use Strategy (LUS) – Getting the best from our land – was published in March 2011. The LUS is a requirement of the Climate Change (Scotland) Act 2009, highlighting the important contribution that Scottish Ministers expect land use and land management to make towards the climate change agenda in Scotland. The crucial component of the LUS are its ten principles for sustainable land use – the LUS Principles. The LUS Principles are the key mechanism by which the strategic intent of the national level LUS can be translated into regional and local level planning and decision-making, through existing land use delivery mechanisms, to inform action on the ground. The overall aim of the LUS Delivery Evaluation Project therefore was “to evaluate the range of current land use delivery mechanisms, to ascertain their effectiveness in translating the strategic Principles of the LUS into decision-making on the ground”. The evaluation considered eleven case study land use delivery mechanisms ranging from an urban Local Development Plan (LDP) to the Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park Partnership Plan

Urban sustainability in Europe: a stakeholder-led process

Reflecting the EEA’s mandate, the focus of this report is on urban sustainability from an environmental perspective. It presents an urban sustainability conceptual framework based on an extensive knowledge review and has incorporated a broad stakeholder-led process involving both internal (EEA and EIONET), external experts and cross institutional contributions

Urban sustainability in Europe: avenues for change

This report is the EEA's flagship report on urban environmental sustainability. It sets out the EEA's conceptual framework for urban environmental sustainability and brings together recent analysis of urban nexuses and research to understand drivers of and barriers to urban environmental sustainability transitions.The European environment — state and outlook 2020 report emphasises that cities have a key role when it comes to wider sustainability transitions across Europe. Cities are hubs of creativity, innovation and learning and have the capacity to effect systemic changes across a range of critical environmental issues (EEA, 2019a). Cities concentrate people, jobs and economic activity. However, this also means that they are disproportionately affected by social challenges such as segregation, poverty and inequality. Vulnerabilities from climate change and other environmental stresses will also be felt most acutely in urban areas because of the higher densities of people and infrastructure and because of cities' dependence on their hinterlands for food, water, energy and other resources (EEA, 2019a). The EEA's in-depth analysis of drivers of change of relevance for Europe's environment and sustainability (EEA, 2020a) emphasised that cities have a primary role in pushing forward societal change by promoting the circulation of ideas and encouraging social and technological innovations, experiments and changes in values, lifestyles and approaches to governance. Cities are therefore both places where systemic challenges must be met and places of opportunity to address these challenges. Of course, cities differ enormously in the challenges they face and the tools they have available to address them. Sharing concrete examples of the many different expressions of urban sustainability can help to inspire city governments, irrespective of their context, to recognise that there is a transition pathway that is right for them

Urban sustainability in Europe: learning from nexus analysis

This report presents the detailed analysis of eight urban environmental sustainability nexus. These constitute examples to help understand the complexity of urban systems and explore how, in practice, using nexus analysis can help identifying existing challenges, potential trade-offs and co-benefits on actions to achieve urban sustainability objectives and opportunities to move towards better coordinated and integrated policy and action. Findings have been summarized in the main Urban Sustainability in Europe – Avenues for change report