Policy, Urban Form, and Tools for Measuring and Managing Greenhouse Gas Emissions: The North American Problem

Nicole Miller, Duncan Cavens, Patrick Condon, & Ronald Kellett

The scale of intervention required to reduce and adapt to the effects of climate change will require action at all levels of government and society. International accords and some federal and state governments are beginning to address greenhouse gas reduction targets, but it is at the local level that most decisions about urban form are made. Yet, urban planners and local decision makers generally lack the tools and means needed to make informed choices about the climate change implications of local growth and redevelopment decisions or to measure the effects of their decisions. While a wide spectrum of tools currently exists, few have the capacity to work simultaneously at both the regional and local scale or to capture the multiple consequences of regulatory decisions. They generally lack the capacity to model the land-use–GHG relationship in a way that informs the policy process in real time.

The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Design Centre for Sustainability at the University of British Columbia have been engaged in surveying existing tools that support land-use policy and decision making in the context of climate change mitigation and urban planning at local and regional levels. To date, two international workshops have been held in Vancouver, an area at the forefront of mitigation policy for GHG emissions. The meetings brought together many of North America’s leaders in tool development, policy implementation, and urban development regulation. Patrick M. Condon, Duncan Cavens, and Nicole Miller at UBC draw from those meetings and review the relationship between urban planning and GHG emissions as a key component of climate change. This paper provides characteristics of GHG decision support tools and evaluates the strengths and limitations of a cross section of existing tools using those characteristics.