For Release Friday, October 2, 2009
Citiwire.net
There’s cap-and-trade, the international accord emerging from Copenhagen, wind farms, hybrid vehicles, green buildings, solar panels, and carbon sequestration. But planners know well there’s another fundamental strategy in the challenge of climate change: achieving greenhouse gas emissions reductions through better land use planning.
Metropolitan regions across the country are now aligning growth plans with that one goal in mind–reduced emissions in both redevelopment and new development, linking land use, urban form, and transportation to help head off the planetary emergency. Good tools to help decision-makers at the local and regional level, however, are only beginning to emerge.
This is work in the trenches, and planners need help. Now more than ever, they need to rely on modeling and forecasts to make sure standards, guidelines, rules and regulations will get the most bang for the buck. There’s no point in making requirements that don’t truly result in emissions reductions, through lower vehicle miles traveled (VMT) or other means.
Initiatives at the local and regional level must be comprehensive, capable of being tested and evaluated, and intelligible to a wide range of stakeholders, says a new report, Urban Planning Tools for Climate Change Mitigation, which details four case studies–in North Vanccouver, suburban Chicago, Superstition Vistas in Arizona, and King County, Washington–that illustrate pathbreaking efforts to link urban form and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.
The report was authored by Patrick M. Condon, Duncan Cavens, and Nicole Miller, all at the University of British Columbia, where the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Design Centre for Sustainability have convened a series of meetings to assess tools to support land use policy and decision making in the context of climate change mitigation and urban planning at both the local and regional scale.
All the tools use cutting-edge technology to give planners a climate readout on development. INDEX, a planning support software for land use and transportation modeling used in Elburn, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, and hundreds of other locations, makes quick and easy-to-understand calculations about the energy use and carbon emissions associated with different types of land uses, varying density, and transit availability to reduce vehicle miles traveled.
I-PLACE³S, a Web-based, publicly available modeling platform for measuring the climate impacts of the built environment, developed by the State of California and administered by the Sacramento Area Council of Governments, has been tested in the King County, Washington HealthScape initiative to analyze the transportation and public health impacts of land development alternatives in Greater Seattle.
Envision Tomorrow, a suite of urban and regional planning tools developed by Fregonese Associates that models land use decisions ranging from the scale of a specific development site to a much larger area, is being used in the development of Superstition Vistas, the 275-square-mile expanse of former state trust lands near Phoenix. The tool includes analysis of the physical and financial feasibility of development, and provides data on the carbon footprint of different scenarios–development using green building techniques, for examplle, or with greater density, walkable neighborhood design, or multi-modal transportation options.
Development Pattern Approach, a database of parcel-scale examples of streets, open space, and buildings across a range of densities, was developed by ElementsLAB in the Design Centre for Sustainability at the University of British Columbia, and used in North Vancouver’s sustainability master plan aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050. The spatial modeling incorporates GIS and Google SketchUp to produce dramatic visual and quantitative results when changes are made–replacing a single-family house with a duplex, for example.
Producing comprehensive, three-dimensional, accessible urban planning tools for climate change mitigation is a daunting task. A crucial need is for tools that can be applied to a range of scales–from an individual building, major project, or new neighborhood, right up to a broader region, where there are many more moving parts.
Planners need to be able to say definitively whether development and future urban form will result in reduced emissions. Software developers of planning support tools have begun to provide some answers. Political leaders need to insist on applying all available tools, and reports on alternatives, before they approve new developments. Technology is central in building a smart energy grid or a more fuel-efficient vehicle, but these innovators have become some of the most important foot soldiers in the fight against climate change.
Anthony Flint, a writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, can be reached at anthony.flint@lincolninst.edu.
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