Town planning plays a critical role in environmental sustainability and it must be a fundamental component of our collective response to the climate emergency. Otherwise we are doomed to failure.
Planning policy is failing to respond to the climate emergency
Therefore it is highly disappointing that there has been little emphasis on the short term and long term impact of our current planning and development practices in most of the discussions related to climate change.
For example, one short term impact of our current planning policy is the ongoing demolition of robust, retrofittable buildings and their subsequent replacement with often less-robust concrete structures. Many sources quote that cement production alone “is the third ranking producer of anthropogenic (man-made) CO2 in the world after transport and energy generation.”(1)
Catastrophically, this approach to urban consolidation (which has had a less than negligible impact on reducing urban sprawl) has removed many hectares of green open space, mostly in the form of private gardens that provide many benefits such as heat sinks and permeable surfaces that prevent water run-off. In many cases these gardens also have the potential to grow some of our food and many are already doing so. In a low carbon society, reducing food miles will be critical.
Too much development is substandard
Added to this is the fact that much of the new development that has taken place over the past two decades is built to a depressingly low standard. With a shelf life of only a few decades, these developments too will need to be demolished in the medium term, and of course this will be at the expense of further carbon emissions.
The long term impact of Australia’s current development and town planning legacy is even more catastrophic when you consider the massive increase in car dependent suburbia and the loss of much of our food bowls close to our cities. When you factor in the loss of valuable biodiversity and irreplaceable habitat such as the valuable native grasslands on Melbourne’s urban fringe or the thousands of hectares of eucalypt forest that are being destroyed to create developments such as the North Lakes and Springfield developments on Brisbane’s fringe, we paint a bleak picture.
The need for systemic change
Australia must urgently end its addiction to property development and move towards a model of town planning that minimises new development and focuses on better utilising our existing built stock with priority given to occupying the hundreds of thousands of homes that lie empty across Australia.
This means that we will need to create a new economic model that is radically different from the current property and development driven growth based economic paradigm. There is no way around this if we wish to reach beyond zero emissions in the fastest possible time.
Two degrees temperature rise is disastrous
In the words of Professor Will Steffen, “the neoliberal economic system we’ve bought into is completely at odds with how the earth works. We have to change this value system that we operate under. We need a social tipping point that flips our thinking, before we reach a tipping point in the climate system.”(2)
The proposal that I am putting forward is intended to be the starting point of a wider conversation on the town planning response to the climate emergency. I expect and hope that this will grow as more minds grapple with the ideas and issues.
However, it is important that a degree of vigilance be put in place to ensure that a rapid transition to beyond zero emissions remains the central premise and that the urgent and radical ideas laid out here are not appropriated by ideologies that run contrary to addressing the climate emergency (as is too often the case).
For anyone reading this who may not be persuaded by the seriousness and urgency of what we are facing, it is worth reinstating that there is general consensus that a “two degree rise is disastrous if not game over”. Right now it seems almost impossible to think that we will achieve anything less than a two degree rise. According to climate change researcher, Barry Smiler,
“More than half of the greenhouse gases that have been generated have been released in the last 30 years, and the release rate is rising because there has never been a year in which less fossil fuel was burned than the year before. CO2 takes 10 years to begin causing full damage so the effects we see today are the result of gases released only before about 2010. We are already at +/- 1C over baseline. The greenhouse gases already released will raise planetary temperature by an additional 2-5C and possibly more (total 3-6C) in the very near term. “
Without wholesale systemic change (and behavioural change, but more on that later) “this release rate is virtually guaranteed to continue for at minimum the next 5-10 years due to social inertia, political push-back, and the sheer time to get anything done in this world” (3).
Eight town planning responses to the climate emergency
Based on this knowledge, I have put together a list of eight steps that should be given serious consideration:
1. End all housing development on or beyond the urban fringes of our towns and cities, unless that development is part and parcel of a wider project to drawdown carbon into the soil, either through regenerative farming practices, re-wilding (in cooperation with First Nations people), biomass planting projects, and bush regeneration. Any such housing projects would endeavour to use recycled materials as well as carbon neutral and/or carbon negative building materials such as hemp and bamboo.
2. Urban consolidation does have net benefits if it is done right and if it is not used as a green light to raze entire neighbourhoods to the ground.
Therefore, any densification that takes place must not be at the expense of buildings that are robust and retrofittable. Housing stock that is not deemed salvageable can be replaced, but only with higher density co-housing style developments that are preferably run as cooperatives. Existing gardens would (as much as possible) be incorporated into any new developments and those gardens could be a resource for the new communities that are created.
3. In terms of transport, all existing proposed new road building projects will not proceed unless there is very good reason. Our focus from hereon will entirely be on improving and interconnecting walkability, public transport networks and bicycle pathways.
4. The principle focus must be on ensuring that empty houses and units in our cities and towns are habited before looking at creating other housing options. If need be, these homes will be compulsorily acquired. In Melbourne alone there are currently up to 82,000 empty homes.
5. New economies may emerge in our regional towns based around the need to drawdown carbon, either through regenerative farming, biomass planting or re-wilding. Therefore, some regional areas may grow as a result and once empty houses are filled, new carbon neutral developments should go ahead (as long as they linked with land use practices that will sequester carbon).
6. We will need to look at retrofitting the existing built spaces that are currently not used for housing, such as converting double garages into habitable units (there are a lot of them in the relatively low- dense outer suburbs) and converting disused office space. This will help to increase densities without the need for additional development.
7. We will need to encourage other types of housing such as yurts and tiny houses to add to the housing mix. These have the advantage of being able to be slotted into existing communities with minimal impact on the land and on surrounding flora and fauna.
8 We could look into redeveloping land in our cities that has previously been developed but that is now left vacant. This is known as brownfield site redevelopment. It is a slow process but it can have positive net benefits if done well. This should only occur in addition to the above seven points and only if there is a human need for this additional development and/ or if it can be achieved without having an impact on our urgent need to draw down carbon.
Town planning, population and mutual Aid
Our response to the climate emergency must involve working both at the local level and at the international level and of course radical town planning policies will need to be a central component of that approach.
What is important is that we share our knowledge with the rest of the world as part of a wider program of mutual aid where ideas, resources and knowledge are shared freely across borders. This will enable communities across the world to be best equipped to create resilient, regenerative communities that draws down carbon and enables the re-wilding that is required to start to reverse the sixth great mass extinction.
In areas of high fertility, populations will start to stabilise once women have access to education, become empowered and have access to universal healthcare and contraception. From the perspective of Population, Permaculture and Planning, this is a critical issue. It is also a critical issue to the author of Drawdown, Paul Hawken who places educating girls and family planning at six and seven respectively in his list of solutions to mitigate climate change (4). It was the author himself who said that a combination of those two points would have a ranking of number one.
If however you do not place much importance on the population issue, be assured that the empowerment of women (as well as access to vital services) must be central to any international collaborative approach, otherwise we will fail to create the equitable resilient communities that are needed. Therefore, the issue of population need not be a point of contention for those who are reluctant to tackle the issue, as the approach that is needed to reduce population growth in an equitable and non coercive manner is also crucial for a whole range of other reasons in the broader goal of creating social and environmental resilience.
Common ground population growth & climate change
Therefore those people who are reluctant to mention population in their discussions on climate change can talk about the issue in this context with the full knowledge that it will not deter from the holistic approach that is required to tackle the climate emergency. It will also help to created a united front between activists who do see population as a priority and those who don’t. Finding common ground and a united approach is absolutely critical and this feeds into the importance of working towards behavioural change (again, more on this later)
In terms of population growth in Australia, much of it is driven by immigration. Under the current neo-liberal model, migration to Australia is put in place largely as a means to perpetuate and justify our current unsustainable planning and development approach. In a post neo-liberal society, population growth will be absorbed mostly by carrying out the aforementioned eight steps.
It is also likely that the process of international mutual aid will result in fewer people feeling the need to migrate as communities become empowered to work and collaborate at a local level. However, for people who do migrate to Australia it will be with the knowledge that they are joining a society that is dedicated to tackling the climate emergency and we (and the world) will very likely be all the better for it.
As people have an impact wherever they live, the environmental impact of migration may not be regarded as a major issue. However, this is only true if people migrate to places where they can inhabit and retrofit existing structures and existing infrastructure as opposed to migrating to areas where existing housing and infrastructure is lacking (thus forcing further encroachment into non human habitat).
Fortunately there are many parts of Australia and the world where there is vacant housing and often vacant neighbourhoods. In China for example, there are entire cities that are empty of people. These ghost cities are a legacy of a totally unsustainable approach to planning and development. However the best thing that we can do now is to work as much as possible to ensure that these places are inhabited before any additional developments take place.
There is of course the issue of climate refugees and the fact that people will in all likelihood be forced to migrate as the climate emergency intensifies. It is impossible to predict with certainty the areas of the world from where people will be forced to flee and the kind of scales we are looking at. We will need to work towards a global approach to housing refugees, mostly to reduce the length of journey that people need to make and to prevent certain areas from being overwhelmed. Housing refugees will likely be our number one humanitarian and town planning requirement and the eight approaches that I have listed can play a substantial role in making that happen, at least at the beginning.
Behavioural change and the climate emergency
It is crucial that the climate emergency response is undertaken with the understanding that we must work to change our behaviour. The climate emergency is as much caused by humans reflecting their inner trauma outwards as it is anything else.
What I mean by this, is that unless we change the collective behaviour that led to the climate emergency in the first place, we will not only be doomed to fail in the medium to long term, we will also fail to persuade the vast majority of people to adapt their lives to tackle the climate emergency in the short term. This is why it is essential that we make the pursuit of finding common ground a priority as opposed to perpetuating the politics of division.
By looking for common ground we will help to reduce the cognitive dissonance that gets in the way of tackling more divisive issues. Further to this, we will need to teach critical thinking and embrace nuance; all with the understanding that we will not overcome the climate emergency with one set of values alone. This means that we will need to be comfortable with having our own ideologies challenged and also be willing to change our worldview when it is appropriate to do so.
This will mean identifying less with our opinions, and more on fundamental issues such as our connection to nature and our desire to see a world that our children and the children of all non human animals can inhabit. For this reason, teaching behavioural change through holistic activism has become a priority for me. I have established the Holistic Activism movement (5) as one inroad into this topic and would welcome anyone who would like to join me on this path.
In the meantime I can only hope that the town planning steps that I have outlined in this fact sheet can play some kind of a meaningful role in a wider ongoing conversation about the immense tasks that lie ahead.
This Council Action in the Climate Emergency (CACE) document was written and produced by Mark Allen from Population, Permaculture and Planning and Holistic Activism.net. The article was made available to Redlands2030 through Sustainable Population Australia in the interests of informing community debate and discussion of the issues of population growth and climate change.
Mark has worked as a town planner in South Australia and Western Australia. Mark co-founded Population, Permaculture and Planning in 2015 and has been involved in running sustainable planning workshops across Australia for the past four years.
In 2018 Mark founded holisticactivism.net.
2. How do We go on, Tabitha Carvan, ANU, online article
3. https://www.barrysmiler.com/climate.php
4. Drawdown, Paul Hawken, Penguin Books 2017
5. https://holisticactivism.net/
Published by Redlands2030 – 25 July 2019
Please note: Offensive or off-topic comments will be deleted. If offended by any published comment please email thereporter@redlands2030.net
13 Comments
Thank you Redlands for publishing an article that not only touches on important local planning issues but then widens the scope to include environmentalism, systemic change, behaviour change, and mutual overseas aid/population.
With a scope this broad, not everyone will agree with everything the author presents.
Nevertheless, where there is agreement that negative environmental change, including scarcity of resources, may happen in our lifetimes or the lifetimes of our children, then considerable changes to the way we build our communities need to be considered. More suburbia and more high rise are not the answer.
It is also important to note that many urban planning issues, including developer greed, bad new suburbia, bad new high rise, bad roads etc, are related to broader systemic issues that allow the wrong people to made decisions, time and again.
Thank you Mark for starting the converation
Thanks to Mark Allen . Should not most of these points be applied to Town and Regional Planning Legislation ,Policy and the unfunded /cut Local Government Programs irrespective of Climate Change ? Neil Davidson’s Efforts should be applauded and supported. All the contributors have made benchmark points deserving of assembly into another Article and a series 2 Action Plan.
The baseline assessments of ;Social Infrastructure and its shortfalls(160,000 homeless every night,844,000 migration arrivals 2018-19/2.3Million on Temporary Visas/674,000 No visas) , and Land Clearing (see Essential Koala Habitat June 2019 of 41,000 ha in the Urban Footprint(down from 71,000ha total vegetation UF June 2017),Regional Biodiversity Values losses /logging and clearing in SCRC),Biodiversity and Endemism (See Auditor Generals Report on Conserving Threatened Species Report 7 :2018-19) are not adequately documented in order to plan Climate Change Legislation and Programs. What are the checks and balances as governments rush ? forward to Climate Change Action ?
IMHO Town Planning cannot fix this – in fact, it has been the cause.
I’ve worked in Local and State governments in SEQ since 1989 – I mentioned sea-level rise in my first Terms of Reference for the Deagon Shopping Centre proposal, in 1989…
Since then I have seen progressive voices continuously stifled and deliberately removed from every place they could make a difference. My career certainly suffered from trying to speak truth to power… many times.
I haven’t given up, however planning cannot be of any possible assistance when whole governments are trapped within neo-liberal politics and overseeing collapsing economies, while pandering to rich, ecologically illiterate and climate collapse unconscious vested interests.
I tend to agree with Bayo Akomolofe in his article What Climate Collapse Asks of Us http://www.emergencenetwork.org/whatclimatecollapseasksofus/?fbclid=IwAR2IyQ2Y8bHW9YTSZVxv3-wo-eyXZ4K_NB6aOcchfrWZpjIt7wRyv0wG8kM#_ftn1
“The greatest challenge the Anthropocene poses isn’t how the Department of Defense should plan for resource wars, whether we should put up sea walls to protect Manhattan, or when we should abandon Miami. It won’t be addressed by buying a Prius, turning off the air conditioning, or signing a treaty. The greatest challenge we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead. The sooner we confront our situation and realize that there is nothing we can do to save ourselves, the sooner we can get down to the difficult task of adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality.[1] ”
Sorry guys, game’s up… I tried, and applaud all those still trying. I’m moving to Europe to work with people that can see the writing, and the walls.
Neil
As a town planner and also involved in ecovillage projects I think there is one point missing constantly from discussion and planning policy into the future and that is establishing new villages/towns. The current planning system does not deal with this and there is no ability to do so. Sustainable growth can also occur by designating compact eco-villages in appropriate locations. It seems the approach to planning in Victoria and Australia as a whole has drawn a line in the sand on creating new villages with very little new villages or towns developed in the last 100 years. I suggest new villages on public transport routes with clear boundaries to minimise impact on agricultural land is another solution in the mix and one rarely talked about. Often existing towns are established in areas unsuitable in the growing climate emergency – why develop these more when more suitable places exist. Releasing land for new villages however would require well developed policy and control to ensure development occurs in an affordable and ecological manner rather than at the mercy of the free market and developers.
Aren’t town planning decisions intended, amongst other things, to deal with issues of public interest especially those where predictable undesirable outcomes are likely to occur (such as those resulting from climate change)? Currently, town planners appear to be blindly following inadequate provisions within planning schemes to address such issues. It would not be difficult for development decisions to be based on appropriate performance measures that would avoid climate change problems arising. Maybe it is a time for those that actually understand the technical aspects of such matters including how they might be addressed, to have an appropriate input into planning schemes. Unfortunately in spite of all of the rhetoric to the contrary, those persons who ware able and are interested in contributing are discouraged from doing so, consciously or unconsciously, by currently town planning legislation, consultation processes and planning professionals.
The writer of the above opinion makes some good points but comments like “otherwise we are doomed to failure” only wakens the senses of readers who do not agree with many of his conclusions. Climate change is too important to be controlled by people at the two extremes, the total deniers and the doomsday sensationalists. It is true that our elected officials at council and government levels are letting the nation down with lack of responsible planning but we need to address the issue and deal with it now rather than debate it for another 20 years. Some of these academics allow themselves to ramble on with eloquent statements and lose the reader in the process. I’ll give you two examples. The writer states that “we will need to teach critical thinking and embrace nuance.” Yet in earlier paragraphs he discusses the need for urgent action. This is not helpful. Then, in the second last paragraph he talks about “our desire to see a world that our children and the children of all non human animals can inhabit.” There is a single word for all non human animals and it is called “wildlife.” Then he talks about “Holistic Activism” but makes no attempt to explain it. I can hear people like Pauline Hanson, along with many others saying “please explain.”
If we think changes are necessary to how our cities and urban areas are planned and built to enable a better living environment, so be it, and by all means lets do it. But please, can we stop this climate emergency nonsense that attempts to portray man as being the driver of a global calamity, and has become the catch cry of sensationalists.
There are far too many examples of people in the field of science who don’t agree for me to be jumping aboard the panic express.
In recent times, teams of researchers at universities in Finland and Japan have released findings that point to global warming/climate change as being a symptom of solar activity accompanied with a changing elliptical earth orbit. They were able to back track earths orbit around the sun for 120,000 years, and predict earth will be at a point of orbit closest to the sun in 2600, that will see temperatures increase by 2 to 3 degrees. They also found that mans contribution to carbon dioxide represents .01% of 1%, and in their words basically nothing.
Another example was when a scientist resigned from his position as chairman of a UN climate committee because of what he saw as improper peer review behavior by other members. Sounded to me like they were peer reviewing in the bubble. The same scientist also said the planet was currently encountering heightened solar activity, but in 20 years would enter a cooling phase. He went on to say 80% of scientists don’t agree with the man made carbon dioxide fueled climate change theory, but are loath to express their views publicly. Hmmm, remembering the scientist who was sacked by an Australian university for holding views that disagreed with the status quo, thankfully he did win the following court case.
Other thought is that warming may actually precede heightened carbon dioxide levels, levels which are attained through increased evaporation from the planets greatest source of carbon, the oceans.
Yes, the planet most probably is in a prolonged phase of change, and the current argument of why and how is centered around mans use of carbon, but there are dissenting opinions starting to surface that cannot be ignored.
In the mean time, if there are ways and means to clean up how we live and change how we manage our cities and urban areas, just do it!
Ray Dillon:
Some 600,000 cattle perished in a single rain event in North Queensland earlier this year. Now there are wildfires within 20 km of the North Pole. Of course, two extreme weather events don’t prove a climate emergency, but they do justify a cautious approach to policy formulation.
It’s irrational to cherry pick bits of information about climate change and pit that against the considered view of all the world’s representative scientific bodies. Put it this way. Although there are aberrant snippets of data, no coherent cross-disciplinary theory other than the mainstream one has yet been presented to explain the great bulk of the data. All that “denialists” (for want of a better term) ever seem to do is cast aspersions on the integrity of the world’s climate scientists; they never come up with a credible theory of their own.
In any case, where does the argument lead? That society should take no precautionary action against the prospects of food insecurity, more frequent natural disasters, and tens of millions of climate refugees?
There is no prospect of “just doing” how we manage our cities while the conservative press continually publishes a stream of invective against environmental scientists and planners, demeaning their work, labelling them as green extremists and sneering at scientific evidence of the collapse of natural systems.
And by the way, if your reference to “the scientist who was sacked by an Australian university” refers to Peter Ridd, he was not sacked for holding views that disagreed with the status quo.
Geoff Edwards:
I would tend to think it’s not just irrational, but indeed negligent to not consider alternative views and data which result in findings that don’t align with the popular view. There are obviously differing scientific opinions that don’t suit certain agendas and therefore won’t see air time in the left media, so in order to gain a balanced view, it’s imperative we must be open to all sources of information and not be held captive to just one, all are biased to a point. Of course, the danger of paying attention to just one source is the possibility one could find oneself super glued to a pedestrian crossing.
Yes, floods and fire! Dorothea McKellar wrote about “My Sun burnt Country”, land of fire and flood. Watching the Tour de France this week the race was shortened during one leg because of snow and ice, but looking back one hundred years, it’s evident that similar climactic conditions affected the race then. But as you say, it’s irrational to cherry pick.
You talk of food insecurity and the millions of climate refugees, so why is it that we have not built a dam in this country for 35 years, while at the same time billions of mega litres of excess run off from the monsoon flood season is allowed to disappear into the oceans without seeing a need to capture just a fraction of it? During this time we have seen an excessive migration program artificially drive our population to record levels, remembering we do live on the planets driest continent, why is it that the radical left always oppose common sense water management?
To my knowledge, Peter Ridd, is a marine biologist of 40 years experience? Did he not hold dissenting views about how coral was managing increased ocean temperature?
Where does one begin when faced with an enormous problem? One that so boggles the mind our rational senses are overwhelmed?
The key in dealing with any threat is maintaining rationality, otherwise our responses could easily prove to make matters worse.
In the big picture, or holistic view, climate is supposed to increase by 2 degrees very soon, and the cause is said to be CO2, a gas that is 0.04% of all the gases in the atmosphere. First though, as stated above, the key to dealing effectively with any threat is considering every element carefully.
Therefore, nothing should be assumed simply because it’s the popular view. First, does CO2 cause harmful changes to the atmosphere? At a concentration of 0.04% it’s hardly in abundance, and plants need it to live and improve the concentration of oxygen, which we need to live. This is an example of nature’s balance, so we should be very careful if we decide to mess with her design.
Next, the IPCC report on climate change states that of all carbon production, something like 3% is due to man. Of that 3%, Australia’s contribution is about 1.3%, so in that light, the imperative for massive social change such as the gentleman describes above, lacks credibility.
If we ignore the evidence above, the broader agenda is social change, and climate change is the convenient vehicle that will get us there, whether we want to or not. In simple terms, he’s discussing population control, which sounds good on the surface, but not so good when considered in depth.
The reason we think population is a problem is based on the way human beings are forced to live by Government. It’s not as if it’s that easy to live off the grid in the city, or live in a humpy in the bush – the original inhabitants wanted to, but weren’t permitted, again with disastrous results. Are you beginning to see a pattern here?
How many of us would willingly choose to enter into a mort-gage, which literally means death grip, just to have some shelter? Cheaper alternatives are outlawed, as is everything Government decides that doesn’t provide two things – economic activity, which enables them to tax our labor and initiative, and control. If something doesn’t satisfy those two criteria, it will have a snowflake’s chance in hell of being approved. In short, this is an example of Government solving a problem they’ve created, with more of the same thinking that created it!
I won’t bore you with further detail in the hope others will see the simple sense in the argument so far and continue the discussion for all our sake.
Peter
It is misleading to assert that the “climate is supposed to increase by 2 degrees very soon…”. The average global temperature has already increased by a well-attested 1 degree and this is already playing havoc with agriculture and ecosystems. What seem like small percentage changes can comprehensively disrupt finely balanced natural systems.
Geoff, that’s what he said, not me. However, if that’s the only flaw you found I’ll take it as a compliment.