Into 2008: Planning Issues, Locally and Globally

David Roberts, covering the higher profile of global warming policy assumed in Saturday's Democratic presidential debate, spotlights a critical issue by lauding New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson for "mentioning land use and transportation policy, undercovered as they are." Noting that emissions caps alone aren't enough to truly rise to the challenge, Richardson pointed out that:

It's going to take a transportation policy that doesn't just build more highways. We have to have commuter rail, light rail, open spaces. We've got to have land-use policies where we improve people's quality of life.

Richardson's statements bring a key issue into sharp relief as we look ahead to the issues that will dominate our discussions of climate change in the year ahead. 2007 was a year when smart-growth issues continuously rose in salience, as local communities and state regulators grappled with the reality that any serious effort to reduce carbon emissions will need to account for the impact of large-scale development. Christmas Day's Cleveland Plain Dealer noted the scope of this effect in an in-depth look at the environmental impact of suburban growth, focusing on the particular issue of a new freeway ramp designed to facilitate housing and residential developments. The article concludes with agreement that:

[Local sustainabilty expert David] Beach and others like planners at the National Center for Smart Growth contend that continually building out toward the suburbs not only contributes more to air pollution, but also to water pollution, noise pollution and even light pollution.

"The interchange itself will have fairly small environmental impact as it's going to be built on already disturbed land," Beach said. "But there is a cumulative impact to what will follow a new interchange."

Pam Davis, a senior environmental planner at NOACA [the Northeast Ohio Area Coordinating Agency], agreed in saying that how the land in Avon is developed in the future will determine more of the environmental impact on the community than the interchange itself.

Year's end also brought an announcement demonstrating that local officials in the U.S. aren't the only ones advancing the imperative for smarter growth-- Sustainablog reports that the United Kingdom has decided to make the climate-planning nexus a matter of national policy:

The U.K. Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has ordered UK ministers to factor in climate change consequences for all policy and financial decisions related to transportation, construction, energy, housing and planning.

California Attorney General Jerry Brown deserves enormous credit for raising the issue to a new level of awareness here in the States, in wake of his efforts to apply state environmental-quality law to the planning process. Brown's actions produced several landmark lawsuit settlements and a working behind-the-scenes effort to facilitate and cajole local leadership that continues to unfold.

Brown spent the concluding months of 2007 focused on regional development plans in the San Diego area-- his office determined that while the process made progress by starting to account for climate impacts, it did so to an inadequate level and failed to employ proper smart-growth principles. While regional planners voted to ignore the Attorney General's formal comment and proceed, Brown's office continues to mull its legal options (similar letters of concern preceded his previous lawsuits against San Bernardino County and others). How California and other states continue to proceed on this mostly-uncharted terrain will provide no small share of excitement in the year ahead.