THE CLIMATE CHALLENGE 9 She believes adapting to and mitigating
climate change should therefore be an essential component of both plan-making and development management decisions.
NEED FOR INTERVENTION According to Krabbe, the climate crisis requires stronger collaboration between Government, local authorities, infrastruc- ture providers and housebuilders to plan and develop low/zero-carbon communities. “Local authority planners continue to
face challenges in ensuring the quality of development outcomes, such as around sustainable locations and low-carbon design, due to targets which focus on speed and quantity,” she says. She cites a new report by the UK
Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence (CaCHE), led by the University of Glasgow – ‘Delivering Design Value: the housing design quality conundrum.’ This makes clear that the responsibility for delivering good design is shared by both planners and housebuilders and developers. The report states that housebuilders can be resistant to investing in areas of low land value, and continue to use layouts and house types which lack design value. This is reportedly compounded by local authorities feeling pressure to approve poor designs, due to a fear that develop-
ers will simply go elsewhere. Krabbe believes this is part of the
reason that the delivery of climate adaptation and mitigation ‘on the ground’ is generally poor, however she argues that the Government has also played a “fundamental role in this inaction.” “Constant changes to Government policy
have resulted in widespread confusion, national policy has become overwhelmingly focused on housebuilding at the expense of place-making, and planning departments across the UK have seen severe under- resourcing,” she says. “Government intervention is crucial in
driving climate action through strong and clear political leadership which champions
and prioritises climate action and ensures the planning system is properly resourced to deliver affordable homes.”
RESOURCING STRATEGIC PLANNING Climate change of course poses a problem which crosses local authority boundaries, and as such will require an approach which can consider multiple issues on a strategic scale. Strategic planning will therefore play a crucial role in delivering resilience. In November 2020, the RTPI published
‘Strategic Planning for Climate Resilience’, which highlights how essential strategic planning is for delivering climate resilience and provides guidance on how to go about it. The report was produced to inform the Liverpool City Region’s Spatial Development Strategy – potentially the first strategic plan of its kind in England. One of the most notable findings was
that planning departments across the UK simply “do not have the resources to effec- tively deliver on both climate adaptation and mitigation, and many do not have the resources available to generate the evidence base required to model the risks of climate change and respond with appro- priate adaptation measures.” If the challenging targets are to be met
by the construction sector, Krabbe concludes, this needs to change. g
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