3rd session: climate plans

Climate plans, an instrument for local authorities?

5 p.m. to 8 p.m., atFondation EDF Diversiterre, 6 rue Récamier, Paris 7

With Stephen Wheeler, Ph.D., AICP, Associate Professor, Landscape Architecture Program, Department of Environmental Design, University of California at Davis, and Johanna Gregory Partin, Director of Climate Protection Initiatives in the Office of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom.

Download the program and preliminary questions.

Please leave your questions as comments.

More than thirty US States have launched climate plans and several cities have adopted their own climate plan. These plans have several dimensions and some of them entail the use of innovations. Theoretically, they provide an envelope for all potential climate change initiatives, together with an order of priority. The preparation of climate plans represents a series of crucial and revealing moments in the formulation of approaches to climate change.
▪ Are they an opportunity to rethink the priorities of local public action? What is the role of communities, companies and other stakeholders in them?
▪ What is the contribution of mobility in these plans? What is the approach to mobility?
▪ What role is attributed to mobility innovations in different States?

Discussant: Pierre Radanne, former Chairman of the Environment and Energy Management Agency (ADEME) and chairman of the 4D not-for-profit organisation.

A visit of the exhibition “Dream cities, sustainable cities?”, an exhibition jointly produced by the EDF Diversiterre Foundation and City on the Move, will be organized after the session.

For questions or information, contact: marc.scherer@vilmouv.com

Comments

[Fanny ARAV, Head of External Relations, French Railways]

Q: Are we moving towards a rapprochement between transportation/urban development/residential planning AND COMMERCIAL CONSTRUCTION; a rapprochement of skills (legal, operational and finance)?
Is the concept of free choice in the location of residential areas and, even more so, of business areas, going to be questioned in the name of better coordination between urban development and mobility management, or is there an input that municipalities need to handle as well as possible via the climate plans?

[Stephen Wheeler]

A: In the U.S. I think there’s been a recognition that the public sector needs to establish a stronger planning framework to regulate urban growth at both local and regional scales, with special attention to infill development (within existing urban areas) and development around new rail station areas. This spatial planning emphasis has been a main feature of the “smart growth” movement that has existed in the U.S. since the mid-1990s, and the “new urbanism” movement that came about slightly earlier. There is, though, a continuing tension between this tendency towards stronger planning and the traditional emphasis on property rights and individual choice within American culture.

Climate change planning is likely to reinforce the importance of spatial planning. In California, a 2008 piece of legislation, Senate Bill 375, now requires regional planning agencies to prepare a regional transportation and land use plan that reduces greenhouse gas emissions in line with state policy goals. The details of this planning process are still being worked out. However, S.B. 375 is likely to greatly strengthen planning efforts, and the private sector will need to work within those frameworks. In Portland, Oregon (one of our strongest regional planning jurisdictions), the Metro Council is taking a similar approach. It will revise its regional planning framework so as to reduce emissions, and the private sector will need to comply. However, there are advantages to the private sector in having such planning frameworks. They will presumably provide greater long-term certainty about regulation and infrastructure, thus reducing risk for the developer and increasing profit.

[Johanna Partin]

A: In San Francisco’s case, we have very little new residential construction. When we do build a new residential development, a lot of environmental review must go into the thinking about where that development is sited. Inherent in the environmental review now (under state law) is consideration about how close that development will be to public transit and how many new « vechicle miles travelled » will be created.

[Olivier ARQUIÉ, Manager, ALTO STEP]

Q: Where do we stand with the regulatory commitment to local climate plans (example of the Parisian climate plan, wishful thinking)?

[Stephen Wheeler]

A: In the U.S., much climate change planning is at the moment indeed « wishful thinking . » In other words, the plans establish ambitious goals for which the implementation mechanisms are not fully developed. Often financial resources have not been identified, and political support doesn’t exist for some of the proposed initiatives (changing land use, for example, or greatly improving public transportation).

However, these plans are a start. They help focus public attention on climate change. They usually set climate change goals. They help develop emissions reporting procedures and emissions baselines, which will be useful in the future. The important thing will be to build on these first generation plans with better initiatives in the future.

[Taoufik Souami]

A: In France, the Climate Plans have no regulatory implications. They are voluntary documents established by local authorities (possibly compulsory if one article of the Grenelle 2 program is voted in). Moreover, it is a matter of debate whether the Climate Plans should take regulatory form: in fact, their primary interest is to create processes for the development of measurable communal initiatives. As Pierre Radanne points out, the aim of this first generation of plans is to trigger a decision-making process focusing on Climate, a process that currently doesn’t exist. At this stage, the most important thing is to work together to devise measures suited to local conditions, both involving those affected and developing involvement amongst those who are not sufficiently involved. The second generation of plans could put forward targets with rigourous assessment systems. Regulation would then be one of the ways of moving from setting to implementing targets. There are other ways which could be combined with regulatory imposition: incentives, local taxation, etc.

[Vincent BERDOULAY, Professor, UMR 5603]

Q: Do the climate plans contain elements of the “new urbanism”? What is their impact on consultation procedures?

[Stephen Wheeler]

A: Most current U.S. state and local climate change plans don’t focus extensively on land use and urban design, which is the main subject of the new urbanism. The early climate change plans tend to focus on relatively easy strategies such as requiring public buildings and vehicles to be green, providing incentives for energy conservation, and requiring electric utilities to use some percentage of renewable energy technologies. However, in the long term design strategies contained in the new urbanism as well as the « smart growth » movement (which is similar) will need to be included. This step will require revising local zoning and subdivision codes, and involving the public in land use planning processes.

[Johanna Partin]

A: If, by « new urbanism » you mean locating new developments near public transit, shopping, etc., then yes, the San Francisco Climate Action Plan takes that into account. The updated Climate Action Plan (end of 2010) will take this into even greater account.

[Taoufik Souami]

A: The new urbanism needs to be distinguished from climate initiative. New urbanism has reincorporated environmental issues into its approaches as they emerged on the urban planning scene. It deals with climate change in the same way as it deals with questions of landscape quality or green spaces.

[Michèle BERNARD-ROYER, independent journalist]

Q: How many emissions will be avoided if all the objectives of the American regional climate plans are combined?

[Stephen Wheeler]

A: Sorry, but I don’t think it’s possible to answer that question currently. The regional (multistate) climate planning processes are in different stages of development, and many of their elements haven’t been finalized yet. Probably also a national framework will emerge before these regional plans are fully implemented.

[Philippe CAHEN, Director, Cahen prospectives]

Q: To reduce pollution from cities, one solution would be to make them denser. To what extent is it possible to densify a city where much of it is privately owned, and to what extent should the city be densified?

[Stephen Wheeler]

A: Some very dense cities are privately owned. Most housing in New York City, of course, is privately owned. In virtually all cases the public sector establishes a regulatory framework in which it is possible to build densely at a profit.

If communities are really to become carbon-neutral, most new development will need to be quite dense. That is because dense forms of housing are generally more energy-efficient and have lower embodied energy than single-family housing, and because dense, mixed-use communities lower transportation needs and so reduce emissions. The challenge, though, as pointed out by the exhibit we saw, is to develop models of urban form that are dense but also green and livable. Because of public resistance to high-rise buildings in the U.S., I suspect that the dominant model in the future will be 3-5 story buildings within a well-designed public environment providing outdoor amenities.

[Elsa RICHARD, Ph.D. student, Laboratoire CITERES Tours]

Q: What backing can the “authorities” mobilise to implement climate plans?

[Stephen Wheeler]

A: In the U.S. it is usually a question of a higher level of government mandating that a lower level implement plans, either by requiring this legally, or by conditioning money on lower level compliance. For example, the federal government has required that states and regions develop transportation plans in order to receive federal transportation money. Many states have also required that cities and counties develop plans to meet certain goals, or risk either losing state money or having development halted within that jurisdiction.

[Elsa RICHARD, Ph.D. student, Laboratoire CITERES Tours]

Q: Do the “authorities” (French regional government or US states) have enough knowledge to decide on mitigation and adaptation initiatives in the context of climate plans?

[Stephen Wheeler]

A: In the U.S. they are now developing that knowledge. The pace varies from place to place. Lots of university research is also being done to assist in this process.

[Johanna Partin]

A: In San Francisco’s case, we used the authority of city government to write our Climate Action Plan into local law.

[Nicole ROUSIER, project manager, PUCA/DGALN/MEEDDM]

Q: What are the connections between climate plans at different spatial scales?

[Stephen Wheeler]

A: That is a good question. Ideally, these plans at different scales would be tightly linked. At present they aren’t. But the linkages are beginning to emerge. In California, as I mentioned above, the state is now going to require regions to model GHG emissions within regional plans, and develop plans that reduce emissions in accordance with state goals. The regions, in turn, will need to develop mechanisms to ensure that local plans and decisions comply with these regional frameworks. They may do so in part by linking transportation investment with local compliance.

[Johanna Partin]

A: In San Francisco’s case, when we were developing our Climate Action Plan, we looked at what existed at the international level (Kyoto Protocol) and the State level (nothing, at the time), to help us decide what goals and actions we wanted to set for ourselves. Now we have a State goal, which is less aggressive than ours. Many citities are in the process of developing or creating their climate action plans, and there is an effort among cities in California to coordinate to make sure we’re all at least using the same units, metrics and carbon accounting methodologies. However, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done to reconcile local climate action plans with those of the state and certainly the federal government (which, in the US, remains non-existent).

[Liliane TOURAINE, Editor, Politiques’Art:]

Q: On what scientific studies did the contributors base themselves? Have comparative figures been established for the different plans?

[Stephen Wheeler]

A: My own comments to the Paris symposium were based on a survey of state and local climate change plans in the U.S., which I conducted in 2007-2008. The article is available in the Journal of the American Planning Association, Autumn 2008. The Pew Center on Global Climate Change also has much data on climate change plans. Their web site is http://www.pewclimate.org/. However, climate change planning is a recent development, and so the amount of comparative information is still relatively small.

[Johanna Partin]

A: Please see the citations in our Climate Action Plan (http://www.sfenvironment.org/downloads/library/climateactionplan.pdf).