Does the planning system in England deliver a sustainable and resilient built environment? A study of the experience of town planners

The case has been made in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes for the crucial role of the built environment in mitigating the worst excesses of a warming global climate and in protecting people through adaptation. Town planners are essential actors in delivering sustainable and resilient urbanism. Given that legislation is implemented by people, the study aimed to examine how town planners experienced and thought about the changing legislation and how they understood the concepts of ‘sustainability’ and ‘resilience’ in the built environment. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 19 planners working in England who had at least seven years’ experience. In the analysis, we explored meanings of sustainability and of resilience, and how these concepts were seen as incorporated in legislation. Sustainability was seen by the participants as embedded in regulations but its realisation varied substantially. Tensions were evident between the three pillars of environment, society and economy. ‘Resilience’ as a concept was poorly understood and legislative support was patchy at best: while flooding features extensively in local plans, wider issues of climate impact such as overheating are not comprehensively addressed. The conclusions are that planners are often frustrated in their attempts to develop a more sustainable built environment and that the current planning system is inadequate to deliver consistently sustainable and resilient outcomes. However, alignment between sustainability goals and professional identity were also noted, offering avenues to explore beyond the institutional constraints of legislation

Enhancing the relevance of Shared Socioeconomic Pathways for climate change impacts, adaptation and vulnerability research

This paper discusses the role and relevance of the shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) and the new scenarios that combine SSPs with representative concentration pathways (RCPs) for climate change impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability (IAV) research. It first provides an overview of uses of social–environmental scenarios in IAV studies and identifies the main shortcomings of earlier such scenarios. Second, the paper elaborates on two aspects of the SSPs and new scenarios that would improve their usefulness for IAV studies compared to earlier scenario sets: (i) enhancing their applicability while retaining coherence across spatial scales, and (ii) adding indicators of importance for projecting vulnerability. The paper therefore presents an agenda for future research, recommending that SSPs incorporate not only the standard variables of population and gross domestic product, but also indicators such as income distribution, spatial population, human health and governance

From rhetoric to reality: which resilience, why resilience, and whose resilience in spatial planning?

This paper analyses contrasting academic understandings of ‘equilibrium resilience’ and ‘evolutionary resilience’ and investigates how these nuances are reflected within both policy and practice. We reveal that there is a lack of clarity in policy, where these differences are not acknowledged with resilience mainly discussed as a singular, vague, but optimistic aim. This opaque political treatment of the term and the lack of guidance has affected practice by privileging an equilibrist interpretation over more transformative, evolutionary measures. In short, resilience within spatial planning is characterised by a simple return to normality that is more analogous with planning norms, engineered responses, dominant interests, and technomanagerial trends. The paper argues that, although presented as a possible paradigm shift, resilience policy and practice underpin existing behaviour and normalise risk. It leaves unaddressed wider sociocultural concerns and instead emerges as a narrow, regressive, technorational frame centred on reactive measures at the building scale

Building adaptive capacity to climate change in tropical coastal communities

To minimize the impacts of climate change on human wellbeing, governments, development agencies, and civil society organizations have made substantial investments in improving people's capacity to adapt to change. Yet to date, these investments have tended to focus on a very narrow understanding of adaptive capacity. Here, we propose an approach to build adaptive capacity across five domains: the assets that people can draw upon in times of need; the flexibility to change strategies; the ability to organize and act collectively; learning to recognize and respond to change; and the agency to determine whether to change or not