Project Description
The expansion of built-up area and urbanization increases global warming, impedes climate resilience and leads to biodiversity loss. Thereby it enhances physical risks like heat waves, flooding and water shortage for municipalities and regions putting pressure on local governments. The Germany government already intends to reduce annual surface sealing and adapt spatial planning to meet climate resilience and climate mitigation targets. To combat the climate and ecosystem crisis, cross-sectoral harmonized targets and effective spatial planning on state, regional and local level would be required, linking biodiversity and climate protection with adaption strategies. But land law is a matter of federal states and land management the responsibility of regional and municipal authorities. Distributed responsibilities and competing (financial) interests on state, federal, regional and local level conflict with sustainable and resilient land use. It moreover leads to scattered and outdated documentation of law and regulation, as well as a lack of evidence-based and transparent governmental decision making and law enforment. The Building Plan-Project collects and digitizes land use related administrative documents like local land use plans, regional land use plans and environmental assessments. It links the data with other spatial information on land use change, demography and settlement types as well as climate risk. It intends to deliver a central platform to analyze the impactof land use planning on regional in the context of climate change and biodiversity loss. Furthermore the platform identifies untapped building potential on already sealed surface. The project thereby enables:
- Municipalities to find best practice approaches for developing local land use plans for specific themes (sustainable land use)
- Regions to analyse the alignment of municipalities’ local land use plans to their land use reduction plans and climate adaption and risk management plans on regional level (example flooding)
- Understand legal barrieres or unintended consequences of regulation for sustainable land use transition (for instance, single family homes that cannot be refurbished to more efficient multi-family homes due to restrictions in the local land use plan (Bauleitplan)
- Collaboration partners include the BBSR, regional managers from Ostwürttemberg and Rhein-Neckar. In addition, GreenDIA has contributed to the DSSGx 2023 at LMU, where a city planner gave input for the scoping.