16 Wetland Futures Report 2013: The Value of Healthy Wetlands
The contribution that good spatial planning policy
and practice can make to the delivery and enhancement
of healthy wetlands is highlighted. It challenges the
popular stereotype of planning as a negative and
bureaucratic process in favour of a more positive,
proactive and co-ordinating role within which all relevant
interests are brought together to optimise benefits
for society.
In realising this new agenda there is an urgency to
address the current divide between the built (spatial
planning) and natural environment (resource planning)
sectors. Each is built on different foundations with
different paradigms, histories, institutions, policies and
tools. This disconnect fuels disintegrated policy and
decisions and lack of mutual understanding which is
most pronounced in the rural-urban fringe. In order for
natural environment thinking to be better embedded
within the planning system there are key hooks that need
to be explored. The National Planning Policy Framework
(2012: paragraph 109), Duty to Cooperate (Localism Act
2011) and Green Infrastructure, provide essential starting
points for engagement with the planning profession over
the use and application of the Ecosystem Approach in
general and its attendant ecosystem services framework
in particular.
Using catchment management thinking in a range of
wetland examples such as through re-wetting uplands,
embedding SuDS within green space in planning
developments and installing green living roofs, other
societal benefits can be demonstrated relevant to
contemporary planning and growth agendas in terms
of carbon reduction, costly flood defences or upstream
water pumping schemes. The use of ecosystem services
reframes the environment as a benefit rather than simply
as a constraint to development. It is important to take
account of such values and benefits that nature provides
as fully as possible and embed them in the various
tools that are emerging. In particular Impact Assessment
processes offer an important conduit for ecosystem
services but there is also significant opportunity in the
development of the community infrastructure levy and
biodiversity offsetting that need to be secured. It is
important when undertaking such endeavours not to
forget the intrinsic value and irreplaceability of nature
which can become crucial when trade-offs are being
considered in difficult planning decisions.
There is a need for planners and environmentalists to
have a better mutual understanding of each other’s
theoretical and policy bibles and to co-produce a shared
vocabulary based around securing multiple benefits
The benefits of healthy wetlands from a local planning perspective
Professor Alister Scott, Professor of Environment and Spatial Planning, Birmingham School of the Built Environment
Professor Alister Scott presenting at the conference
photo: Hannah Freeman
