Page 4585 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 19 October 2010
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For the first time in human history, more than 50 per cent of the global population lives within urban areas, and it is projected that by the middle of this century this figure could reach as high as 70 per cent. We know urban areas produce as much as 70 per cent of the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change. We know that urban settlement is a rampant consumer of resources and a producer of waste. Canberra cannot sit in splendid isolation from these events. We need to accept now that the future will be different. We should be looking forward to new solutions and not casting back a century for answers to Canberra’s challenges. Walter Burley Griffin could never have foreseen the changes in lifestyles that technology has delivered and that climate change will require. We should not try and reinterpret his ideal city of the future.
None of this is intended to sound alarmist, but we have to put our present and future actions into perspective and into context. In respect of the planning of our city, this will be central to the local, national and international response by governments and civil society. The importance of city planning has been recognised by the UN, by the commonwealth heads of government, by COAG, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and by a host of research, academic and professional institutions.
With greenhouse gas emissions in the ACT being predominantly emitted by the built environment, including transport, the government is taking clear steps now to address how we plan for the next century of development. For example, we are driving change to planning policy through the sustainable futures program, to support the government’s climate change strategy, weathering the change. This includes examining the resilience of the pattern of spatial development in Canberra, scenario planning for different spatial distributions and greater analysis of biodiversity impacts.
It also includes examining the location for increased urban densities and how we can best optimise established infrastructure and services, including master plans for specific locations. We are recalibrating the Canberra spatial plan, to ensure that it is responsive to and can deliver on the key principles that are contained within it.
The spatial plan can affect both 62 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions caused by building energy and assist in reducing the 23 per cent caused by transport. We are consulting with industry, professional associations and the community to strengthen solar access rules in the territory plan. This work is currently going on through the code review reference group that I established to consider draft territory plan variations 301 and 303.
The government are also working with the community and industry to implement carbon targets for entire estates, and we are implementing more comprehensive measures to increase residential densities within town and group centres, to meet the needs of a community that will be demographically different to what it is now. This includes higher density along transport corridors and areas that have been bypassed by previous development—or where the development has passed its economic life cycle.
The government are developing a world’s best practice sustainable development project at East Lake, as well as looking to introduce more sustainable development
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