Inspiring Futures for European Local Governments!

Since 1994, more than 2000 European local governments have adopted the principles of the Aalborg Charter as a basis for local sustainability action. Now, ten years later in June 2004, these local governments will gather once again in Aalborg, Denmark at the Fourth European Conference on Sustainable Cities and Towns in Europe, Inspiring Futures—Aalborg+10. The Aalborg+10 event will celebrate a decade of European local sustainability action, evaluate progress and stagnation, and, more importantly, will adopt new commitments to move from Agenda to Action. The conference will be crucial for accelerating local sustainability in Europe and to move towards Local Action. Here an overview is provided on the context against which this important conference is set and its expected outcomes.     

Confusing messages of sustainability indicators

This study examines sustainability indicators using the sustainability report of the Finnish Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry as the case study. The report is a compilation of indicators designed to assess the sustainability of natural resource management. The interviews with the users revealed, however, that the indicators have not been particularly effective in informing the actors or in affecting their behaviour. Clearly, the informative value of the indicators has been overrated and the complexity of the information transfer has been underestimated. At least partly, the difficulties were due to the obscurity of the indicator-concept itself and consequently to their improper use. First, the statistics with the objective state-of-affairs information should be distinguished from the indicators that are always related to policy discussion. In addition, the technical and communicative use of the indicators should be distinguished from each other as they have different relationship between the information, policy values and the associated activities.     

Urban sustainability and environmental justice: evaluating the linkages in public planning/policy discourse

Many cities' municipal governments have made some version of “sustainability” an explicit policy goal over the past two decades. Previous research has documented how the operationalisation and conceptualisation of sustainability in urban sustainability plans vary greatly among cities, particularly with respect to environmental justice. This article reports on whether and how large American cities incorporate environmental justice into their urban sustainability indicator projects. Our findings suggest that while there has been an increase in the number of cities incorporating environmental justice elements into sustainability plans since the early 2000s, their conceptualizations and implementations of sustainability remain highly constrained. The paucity of evaluative tools suggests that environmental justice efforts are potentially losing traction in public debate over macro-scale sustainability concerns (e.g. climate change) or the need for regionally competitive environmental amenities (e.g. parks). This paper concludes with suggestions for revising existing sustainability plans to better reflect environmental justice concerns.     

Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail? Examining the “green” of Green Infrastructure development

The rapid development of Green Infrastructure as an approach to planning has enabled landscape practitioners to implement a range of projects utilising its principles. Discussions though exist examining what Green Infrastructure is, how it should be planned, and whether it can be identified as only those elements of the landscape that are green. A further element of this argument examines the use of water within this process. Therefore, as planners, we can ask: can we tell a green field from a cold steel rail? Both may have a green or sustainable function with only the visual appearance differing. Debates, however, focus on practitioner selectivity of the interpretation of “green” infrastructure planning exploring whether physical landscape characteristics or the function of an investment is the main focus of discussion. Using the grey–green continuum developed by Davies et al. [2006. Green infrastructure planning guide project: Final report. Annfield Plain: NECF], this paper examines whether geographical differences exist in the application of the Green Infrastructure and examine how practitioners use the ambiguity of Green Infrastructure planning to guide investment. Drawing on academic and practitioner literature provides this paper with a balance of conceptual and process-based assessments evaluations of global Green Infrastructure focusing on the design and implementation of terrestrial and marine resources. This paper also examines whether the dominant landscape planning framework in each region could be considered contradictory to the wider application of Green Infrastructure principles.     

“Liberating” social knowledges for water management,and more broadly environmental management,through “place-change planning”

In response to the big policy problem of increasing failures of traditional, largely technical, policy approaches to constructively address transformational or radical socio-environmental problems from major facility siting, landscape modification, and/or new environmental management at the local level, this paper introduces “place-change planning”. This concept is applied to recent calls by Australian water scientists and policy-makers “to liberate the knowledge, skills and individual leadership and collaboration of all stakeholders to reflect a more decentralised, disaggregated and localised water world”. Local community stakeholders appear the most neglected stakeholder currently in such water management, despite increasing international recognition of their importance for constructive change in transitional sustainability contexts. As such, place-change policy design focuses on the importance of collaborative participatory approaches for better understanding of the underlying rationalities, and, by association, of better liberating the social knowledges, of place-based local communities for better policy input to realise new visions of sustainable water management, and beyond.     

Between municipal and regional planning: the development of regional district heating systems in Stockholm from 1978 to 2010

District heating (DH) is an important part of the Swedish energy system and one of the most important climate measures at the municipal level. The Swedish planning system gives a large amount of power to municipalities, thus leaving the regional level weak. Despite this, the DH systems in Stockholm have developed into regional systems; how has this development occurred and what made it possible? Regional and municipal strategies concerning DH and energy from 1978 to 2010 have been studied through Regional plans and comprehensive plans. The conclusions show that the municipal DH systems have grown and become interconnected, thus fulfilling one of the most important regional strategies: to expand and interconnect the systems to be able to build combined heat and power plants. This is not entirely due to the regional strategies, however; the local importance of the system, economic reasons and supply security are other explanations. The study shows that regional importance generally has grown, and thus also the regional focus on DH. As environmental and climate issues have risen on the agenda, the importance of DH from the municipal perspective has become more evident, as well as a shift from supply orientation to more focus on energy efficiency.     

Gendered dimensions of climate change response in Swedish municipalities

This article elaborates on and discusses gendered dimensions of climate change response in Swedish municipalities. There are indications that attitudes and behaviour to the environment and climate change are gendered. This evidence together with our own work further indicates that gender awareness is most probably an important influence on how municipalities respond to climate change. The aim of this study was to investigate if and how gendered aspects of climate change response are integrated in the Swedish response to climate change. The potential causal relationships between a high level of awareness of the gendered aspects of climate change and the levels of climate change response were investigated. We asked whether there is a positive relationship between gender awareness and the quality of the communities' climate change policies and practice. Indications of such a relationship prompt a change in research priorities – paying more attention to gender – and in subsequent policy developments.     

DROUGHT POLICY IN THE U.S. AND AUSTRALIA: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS1

ABSTRACT: Federal and state governments in the United States and Australia have come to play a key role in attempts to mitigate the impact of drought. Government actions have usually taken the form of loans and grants to individual citizens, businesses and municipalities experiencing the hardship of drought. Most of these actions have occurred in an environment of crisis management, rather than as a result of clearly stated policy objectives. Based on a review and evaluation of recent drought policy in the United States and Australia, recommendations are offered on ways to improve the United States’approach. A national drought plan is suggested as an efficient mechanism through which these recommendations could be implemented. States should also become more actively involved in drought assessment and response, but these actions must be coordinated with federal actions.     

Planning for robust reserve networks using uncertainty analysis

Planning land-use for biodiversity conservation frequently involves computer-assisted reserve selection algorithms. Typically such algorithms operate on matrices of species presence–absence in sites, or on species-specific distributions of model predicted probabilities of occurrence in grid cells. There are practically always errors in input data—erroneous species presence–absence data, structural and parametric uncertainty in predictive habitat models, and lack of correspondence between temporal presence and long-run persistence. Despite these uncertainties, typical reserve selection methods proceed as if there is no uncertainty in the data or models. Having two conservation options of apparently equal biological value, one would prefer the option whose value is relatively insensitive to errors in planning inputs. In this work we show how uncertainty analysis for reserve planning can be implemented within a framework of information-gap decision theory, generating reserve designs that are robust to uncertainty. Consideration of uncertainty involves modifications to the typical objective functions used in reserve selection. Search for robust-optimal reserve structures can still be implemented via typical reserve selection optimization techniques, including stepwise heuristics, integer-programming and stochastic global search.