Climate action guide for urban planners

Designing Our Future: How Urban Planning Becomes a Climate Solution

By 2050, two out of every three people on Earth will call a city home. This monumental demographic shift brings with it an equally monumental challenge: as cities grow, they often expand outwards, devouring more land at an alarming rate. The built-up urban area is currently growing faster than its population, resulting in vast, sprawling cities that frequently encroach upon areas highly vulnerable to climate hazards.

The statistics are stark: approximately 80% of cities worldwide face significant risks from extreme heat and devastating flooding. Even more concerning, around 90% of urban expansion in countries of the Global South is occurring near hazard-prone areas, often taking the form of unplanned and informal settlements that lack crucial protective infrastructure.

This pressing reality underscores the vital role of urban planning. It is a core city function that offers unparalleled opportunities to steer urban development towards pathways that are both lower-carbon and significantly more responsive to evolving climate risks. To empower urban planners globally to fulfill this critical role, a new guide has been launched, available in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Arabic.

This comprehensive guide focuses on the preparation and policy content of urban plans, known by various names such as strategic spatial plans, master plans, and land use plans. Crucially, it also identifies a diverse range of planning policies from cities across the world that have been specifically designed with climate considerations at their very core.

Urban Planning as a Transformative Climate Solution

The guide powerfully illustrates the indispensable importance of urban planning in tackling rising climate challenges. The decisions made by urban planners today will directly define a city’s capacity to meet its climate goals and, fundamentally, enhance the quality of life for all residents, both now and into the future.

For instance, the guide highlights how strategic urban planning can:

• Increase density and foster efficient built forms to significantly reduce emissions from buildings.
• Shorten distances between amenities and enable mode-shift (e.g., from cars to walking/cycling) to drastically cut transport emissions.
• Curb urban sprawl and greenfield development to preserve invaluable natural land and its vital carbon sequestration potential.
• Control urban development on hazardous land to reduce exposure to climate risks such as devastating flooding or destructive landslides.
• Preserve natural land and prioritize land for nature-based solutions (like parks, green corridors, and wetlands) to mitigate the impact of climate events if they do occur, acting as vital natural sponges and cooling systems.

A Practical Framework for Climate Action in Urban Planning

After firmly establishing urban planning as an essential tool for driving impactful climate action, the guide delves into two key, actionable components:

1. It distills ten common stages involved in preparing and delivering an urban plan, elaborating on precisely how climate change considerations can be effectively embedded within each of these stages. This provides a practical roadmap for planners at every step of the process.
2. It identifies and explains seven key planning policy areas for climate action, showcasing compelling examples of these policies in practice by cities from around the world. These include strategic urban planning for:
   • Tackling flooding, extreme heat, and drought (exemplified by cities like Auckland, Cape Town, London, Singapore).
   • Nature-based solutions (with insights from Bogotá, São Paulo, Oslo).
   • Building resilient informal settlements (drawing lessons from Nairobi, Mumbai, São Paulo).
   • Creating compact cities (as seen in Amman, Portland).
   • Developing polycentric cities and fostering proximity (inspired by Seoul, Milan).
   • Promoting mode-shift and transit-oriented development (with examples from Delhi, Austin, Mexico City, Jakarta).
   • Designing sustainable buildings (showcased by Shanghai, Medellín, London).

The Imperative for Greener, Healthier Cities

The guide unequivocally demonstrates that it will be impossible to create greener, healthier, and more equitable cities without decisively tackling the climate crisis. This invaluable resource will undoubtedly serve as a crucial guide for urban planners globally, empowering them to play their critical role in both reducing cities’ greenhouse gas emissions and significantly enhancing urban resilience to climate hazards. Their decisions today will literally shape the liveability of our cities for generations to come.

source:
https://www.c40knowledgehub.org/s/article/Climate-action-guide-for-urban-planners?language=en_US