Climate Risk and Security: New Meanings of “the Environment” in the English Planning System.

Planning in England1 represents an important arena for the development and contestation of environmental discourses. Over the last century the changing assumptions about human-nature relationship have led to numerous meanings of “the environment” in planning. These have in turn influenced the choices made between: preserving, enhancing, protecting, compromising, trading, exploiting or guarding against, the environment. While recognizing the nuances of the environmental discourses, this paper identifies eight distinct meanings of the environment in contemporary plans including the environment: as local amenity, as heritage landscape, as nature reserve, as storehouse of resources, as tradable commodity, as problem, as sustainability and as risk. The latter has emerged as a result of growing climate change awareness. The paper argues that, while the emphasis on climate change mitigation has reinforced some aspects of the sustainability discourse, the adaptation agenda has introduced a new meaning of the environment as risk. This portrays the environment not so much in terms of assets to be sustained for human benefit, but in terms of threats against which human well-being should be safeguarded. Framed in the language of risk and security, this new discourse is bringing to the fore some of the outmoded approaches to planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]