BY BRADFORD MCKEE

DurkTalsma/iStock by Getty Images.

Development as usual is not cutting it in the era of climate change. A new interdisciplinary report released this morning by the American Society of Landscape Architects calls on public officials and private interests both to transform the ways they plan, design, and build at all scales to counter climate change, and it asserts that the most fundamental and potent mitigation policies and strategies are based in landscape solutions.

ASLA’s Blue Ribbon Panel on Climate Change and Resilience comprised 10 professionals—five of them landscape architects—who produced a slate of recommended policies and planning solutions to guide national and local leaders, as well as private-sector decision makers as they work to address climate change in several specific development arenas. That includes the protection of natural resources, city planning, environmental justice, transportation, and agriculture. They preface these approaches by encouraging that they be based in incentives; be holistic in nature; consider racial and social equity; enroll individuals in communities; and operate at regional, local, and site-specific levels.

Highlights of the recommendations include funding green stormwater infrastructure and conserving critical water supplies, requiring transit-oriented development, heightened attention to “vulnerable” communities at greatest risk of climate impacts, regional transportation planning, and the preservation of farmland to support local food production.

Trying to integrate this matrix of recommendations into public policy making will be complex. Adam Ortiz, a panel member who is the director of the Department of the Environment in Maryland’s Prince George’s County, said, “All public projects really have to be interdisciplinary. They have to incorporate the local culture, the local economy, forward-thinking design concepts, as well as good engineering.”

Diane Jones Allen, ASLA, the program director of landscape architecture at the University of Texas at Arlington, emphasized a need to think about water strategies in development. “We have to live with the acknowledgment that there will be hurricanes and areas that naturally want to flood. How do we build differently, as opposed to thinking we can keep water out?”

The full 24-page report, Smart Policies for a Changing Climate, can be found here. Statements of individual panelists can be viewed here.