Planning for Resilience

We live in a rapidly changing world characterised by increasing unpredictability and its associated risks. Many forces combine to add complexity to our once ordinary twentieth century pathways. Extremes of weather, climate change, costs of food, raw materials and energy and a destabilised global economy pile unprecedented pressures onto our lives. A plethora of factors affect the ways in which plan, design and build buildings and cities in a multiply-changing climate. Scotland is leading in many aspects of climate change research and this chapter on Planning for Climate Change is very timely, reflecting rapid changes in the field, in pace with the changing climate and the knock-on socio-economic impacts. Never since the emergence of the UK Planning Profession has there been a time when so much change has been imposed on the profession. The lessons contained in this chapter are key to the evolution of Planning here and around the world. The chapter starts with a brief overview of the background science of climate change and touch on the impacts of a warming world and more extreme weather on the following topics: