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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.
Notes
1. Strategic planning and strategic (environmental) assessments mainly deal with issues of general interest and less with details, they aim to optimize (environmental) performance of a plan or program by proposing respective visions, objectives and their weighting as well as derived measures, they deal with alternatives as early as possible in a planning and assessment process, and they focus on desired states and related options for action and not on the exact impact determination of already agreed measures (cf. Noble Citation2000; Stoeglehner Citation2010).
2. for the role of alternatives in environmental assessments see Stoeglehner (Citation2010).
3. for more information about integrated spatial and energy planning see Stoeglehner et al. (Citation2016).
