Community Resilience to Climate Change: Theory, Research and Practice

199 cause. 2. URBAN ENVIRONMENTAL PLANNING AND BIODIVERSITY: THE U.S. CONTEXT My observations of a paradigm shift in environmental planning are rooted in novel planning efforts over the last fifteen years that were intended to protect biodiversity from urbanization, as well as planning efforts that originate in a desire to establish resilience to flooding events, or—more recently—to adapt to permanent trends such as rising sea levels. For that reason, it is important to briefly note two key U.S. Federal laws, the expansion and enforcement of which led U.S. urban environmental planning to change under different conditions and with different timing than in Europe and Asia. Since the late 1960s, urban environmental planning in western North America has paid increasing attention to biodiversity (Thomas, 2003). Like South America, Australia, India and Africa, western North America was industrialized relatively late, developing cities in the modern sense only after 1850 (Otterstrom, 2004). Large wild animals with strong cultural associations continue to exist within many urban ecosystems—not just in rural areas. Cities across the North American west include small but visible populations of mountain lions (Puma concolor), black bears (Ursus americanus), bald eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus), and Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha), among other species (Beatley, 2000). The US Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1973 was initially focused on conserving populations of species, rather than on maintaining a network of protected habitats, as in the European Union’s Natura 2000 legislation (Verschuuren, 2004). Large animals with extensive ranges often pass through urban and suburban areas during migrations or in search of resources, and the US Endangered Species Act protects these species even from the indirect effects of urbanization, such as pollution in stormwater runoff. For these reasons, urban environmental planning in the United States, particularly the western U.S., has been challenged to plan and design urban areas to accommodate large wildlife species whose populations are in decline, such as the Chinook salmon (Simenstad, Tanner, Crandell, White, & Cordell, 2005), which was listed as threatened under Federal law in the Puget Sound region of Washington State in 1999 (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 1999). Similarly, the U.S. Clean Water Act of 1972 now strictly regulates pollution loads in urban stormwater runoff that originate in dispersed, non-point sources such as motorized vehicle traffic (Craig, 2005). Cities must not exceed established maximum loads, or they face penalties. This extension of the CleanWater Act to set standards for urban runoff promptedwidespread experimentationwith landscape- based methods for detaining runoff and filtering pollutants, significantly expanding the technical role of urban environmental planners. Together, these two Federal laws led to significant changes in urban infrastructure design and urban environmental planning since the 1990s, particularly in regions that discharge urban runoff to ecosystems with high biodiversity, such as the Puget Sound in the Pacific Northwest (Feist, Buhle, Arnold, Davis, & Scholz, 2011; Simenstad et al., 2005), and the Chesapeake Bay in the mid-Atlantic region. It would be impossible to describe the recent trend towards a paradigm shift in North American urban environmental planning without noting these regulations. The efforts of urban planners to optimize the pattern and performance of cities to support aquatic habitat and higher levels of water quality are important points of origin for the paradigm shifts we confront today in relation to climate change (Ward, Anderson, Beechie, Pess, & Ford, 2015). In the first section of this paper, I will present changes in the conceptual frameworks of urban environmental planning as a result of extreme weather events and climate trends. The second section of this paper will contain a review of key methods that are changing as a result of the same phenomena. The third and final section will suggest changes that are beginning to occur in the philosophical assumptions that underlie urban environmental planning, which I argue is the final component necessary to identify a coherent paradigm shift. 3. CHANGING CONCEPTS: FROM “SUITABILITY” TO “SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT” TO “RESILIENCE” TO “ADAPTATION” Over the last thirty years, the stated goals and associated conceptual frameworks of urban environmental planning in the U.S. have changed, and these changes have occurred with increasing speed. Before the 1980s, the dominant framework was driven by the search for “suitability,” defined as a good match between the physical characteristics of a location and its land use, or the type of design that is used (Hills, 1974; McHarg, 1969; Steinitz, 1990). Since that time, the broad goal of urban environmental planning has shifted to an effort to manage “sustainable development” (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987), which recognized that there are limits to development that involve temporal patterns of resource use and availability, as well as spatial patterns. More recently, the goal of many cities and regions has been to achieve “resilience,” or, an ability to recover quickly from disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, river flooding, fires, and terrorist attacks (Chelleri, Waters, Olazabal, & Minucci, 2015). Barely a decade old, the concept of “resilience” to temporary events has already begun to be subsumed under the need to engage in permanent adaptation to climate trends. The concept of “adaptation” refers to reducing the vulnerability of an area to permanent, incremental trends such as higher sea levels, reduced regional rainfall or snowfall, new geographic patterns of disease transmission as a result of warming winters, and extended heat waves—along with the secondary and tertiary effects of these trends on urban regions (Hill, 2015). These changes in the rationales and concepts of planning represent underlying changes in our understanding of the complexity of