Strategicness – the core issue of environmental planning and assessment of the 21st century
Year: 2019
Type: article
Abstract: Environmental problems like climate change, loss of bio-productive land or loss of biodiversity are very likely to become the main drivers for environmental protection and are “strategic” by themselves, as they cannot be examined and solved on single use cases applying location and technical alternatives of projects – as normally applied for projects subject to environmental impact assessment. These “strategic” environmental problems have to be addressed by strategic plans, defining general planning principles and taking system alternatives into account, which calls for a certain type of “strategic” planning and assessment methods building on “strategic” databases. Therefore, I argue that we urgently need a co-evolution of the planning system and the accompanying environmental assessments in order to fill the gaps in strategic planning and strategic environmental assessment, to address environmental issues at the level of system alternatives and to allow for double loop learning in integrated strategic planning and assessment processes.
Author: Gernot Stoeglehner
Institution: BOKU University
Language: English
Subfield: Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2979501037