Land Use Planning, Sustainability and Risk Mitigation: Towards an Integration

Modern cities are under the threat of numerous risks, deriving from emissions, wastes, resource depletion, as well as from natural and technological hazards. Every year, cities are struck by different hazards (earthquakes, floods, industrial accidents) with catastrophic impacts both on human and natural resources. Recent hazardous events clearly highlight that urban disasters are more and more characterized as complex events, shifting from individual phenomena towards “an interactive mix of natural, technological and social events” (Mitchell, 1999) due to changes of hazards, exposure and vulnerability of territorial systems and to the interactive mix of such changes (McEntire et al., 2002). These are critical issues both for urban planning and sustainable development, since hazards pose a relevant threat both to the development itself of cities and to the safeguard of human and natural resources for the benefit of future generations. Accordingly, the need for integrating both environmental and disaster risk considerations into spatial planning has been largely emphasized (UNEP-ISDR, 2008; OECD, 2010). Since the Eighties, the role played by environmental issues in land use planning has been consistently growing in all European countries. Nowadays, almost all land use planning processes have to be subjected to a Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) in order to “provide for a high level of protection of the environment in the preparation and adoption of land use planning tools” (European Directive 42/2001/EC). On the opposite, Disasters Risk Reduction still represents a marginal goal in land use planning processes. Risk assessment and prevention is mainly faced through sectoral plans, based on a hazard oriented approach and devoting scarce attention to the vulnerability of human and natural resources. Furthermore, risk features as well as the potential impacts of planning policies on such features are often neglected within the SEAs. To face these criticalities, a new tool – the SERA – which could largely contribute to an effective integration of Risk Assessment (RA) into the Strategic Environmental Assessment procedures has been provided. This tool is addressed to support land use planners in analysing and assessing the impact that land use planning choices might have on environmental features of the territory, including risks.