Is the Issue of Climate Change too Big for Spatial Planning?

Concerns about the nature, pace and implications of climate change have been the subject of academic and scientific debate for many years. However, it is intriguing, even in the few months since we first commissioned the articles for this issue of Interface, how quickly discussion has moved on. Climate change is now not just a matter for debate over middleclass dinner tables, world summits of the eco-conscious and, perhaps, even (junior) government ministers or conferences of anorak clad scientists, who spend much of their lives dodging frostbite in the world’s polar regions. It has become an issue about which it is virtually impossible to listen to any of the broadcast media without hearing mention or to pick up a newspaper or magazine without encountering an image of a receding glacier or the cracked and baked soil of a once fast flowing river bed. Images of the plight of (cuddly) famished polar bears clearly make good copy, but it is symptomatic of the transition of debate about climate change from the scientific and academic to the popular. It is also a reflection of changing assumptions about the timescale within which the implications of climate change will have demonstrable impacts; that is to say in the life time of our generation not for unspecified generations sometime in the future. Consequently, it is notable in the UK how often the words of the British government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, that climate change represents a bigger challenge to the world than global terrorism, have been quoted recently. So climate change is a significant issue, and according to some possibly the most important issue currently facing the world, but what if anything does this have to do with spatial planning? The purpose of this Interface is to explore precisely this question: to seek to understand the nature of the spatial implications of climate change and to explore the constraints and opportunities for action. Climate change, like perhaps global poverty, can feel like an issue that is too big to handle either personally or for that matter collectively as a spatial planning community. The sense of ‘What can I do in the face of such an enormous challenge? ’ brings with it both a feeling of impotence and a tendency to place one’s head resolutely in the metaphorical sand. However, Rittel & Webber (1973) eloquently reminded us that the problems with which planning is concerned are ‘wicked’ in nature. They are complex, multifaceted and dynamic. Given such an analysis of planning problems, climate change might seem nothing out of the ordinary for planners. Hence it is important to remember the lessons from policy analysis. Taken as a whole the implications of climate change can appear bewildering and insurmountable, but the art of effective policy making is dependent on how the problem, or series of problems, is defined. As many of the following contributions indicate, action on climate change is first dependent on problem definition. Moreover, those involved in policy making need to be ever vigilant of whose definition dominates, what assumptions lie behind such definitions and to what extent problem definition constrains the scope for action or the extent of the options and possibilities considered. There may just be more scope for action than appears possible at first glance. Certainly the following contributions suggest this to be the case, even if they Planning Theory & Practice, Vol. 7, No. 2, 201–230, June 2006