MEASURING THE IMPACT OF SEA‐LEVEL RISE ON COASTAL REAL ESTATE: A HEDONIC PROPERTY MODEL APPROACH*

ABSTRACT This study estimates the impact of sea‐level rise on coastal real estate in North Carolina using a unique integration of geospatial and hedonic property data. With rates of sea‐level rise approximately double the global average, North Carolina has one of the most vulnerable coastlines in the United States. A range of modest sea‐level rise scenarios based on the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report projections (2007) are considered for four counties of North Carolina—New Hanover, Dare, Carteret, and Bertie—which represent a cross‐section of the state's coastline in geographical distribution and economic development. High‐resolution topographic LIDAR (light detection and ranging) data are used to provide accurate inundation maps for the properties that will be at risk under six different sea‐level rise scenarios. A simulation approach based on spatial hedonic models is used to provide consistent estimates of the property value losses. Considering just four coastal counties in North Carolina, the value of residential property loss without discounting in 2030 (2080) is estimated to be about $179 ($526) million for the mid‐range sea‐level rise scenarios. Low‐lying and heavily developed areas in the northern coastline are comparatively more vulnerable to the effect of sea‐level rise than the other areas.     

Policy of Delay: Evidence from a Bayesian Analysis of Metropolitan Land‐Use Choices

Do local policymakers strategically use delay in permitting development to forestall the growth machine? The mantras of smart growth and sustainable development assume local governments can balance the competing values of economic development, ecology, and equity interests in a community. We employ a political market framework to explain differences in local government land use decisions. This framework conceptualizes policy choices as resulting from the interplay between the aggregate policy demand by residents, developers, and environmental interests and the aggregate supply by government authorities. Delays can be imposed strategically through processes of development approval by city governments where industry strength and form of government vary within county‐level service‐delivery fragmentation. We utilize novel Bayesian multilevel modelling of data collected from 2007 and 2015 surveys of Florida city planners and find strong institutional effects and multilevel relationships.     

We Finished the Plan,So Now What? Impacts of Collaborative Stakeholder Participation on Land Use Policy

There is a growing movement toward collaborative stakeholder participation in environmental policy. Rather than calling for a reliance on government officials to solve environmental problems, this approach calls for empowering a community of stakeholders to contribute meaningfully. Scholars examining citizen participation have investigated the performance of such efforts. This study examines one important aspect of performance, the impact of stakeholder participation on policymaking at the local level. A multiple‐case analysis of county‐level, community‐based task forces working on farmland preservation planning in Ohio, U.S., reveals patterns of policymaking processes and the near‐term impacts of collaborative planning. These patterns are linked to scholarship using prior empirical studies as well as the Institutional Analysis and Development framework, which integrates physical, social, and institutional variables to examine collective decision‐making related to natural resources. Results indicate that the degree of policy change is associated closely with local contextual factors, rather than internal group factors often emphasized in studies of citizen advisory committees and collaborative groups.     

Organizing for British national strategy

In December 1968 Ernest May asked how the US government could gain access to ‘long‐headed’ staffers to provide greater strategic depth to foreign policy. The challenge of long‐term strategy persists: how should government be organized to support it, how can the right people be found to staff it and how can political leaders make time for longer‐term policy‐making given the challenge of the immediate? The policy planning staff in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office have traditionally had the task of supporting longer‐range, broader foreign policy. A small group of diplomats—later leavened by externals from the media, non‐profit and private sectors—was meant to generate an improved approach to British interests and policy. As Robert Wade‐Gery recalls of its role in the 1960s, there was a push to forge fresh links with outside thinking. Did it work? Former policy planners can be circumspect about its achievements. One former British planner said he felt like ‘a spare part rattling around in a tin’, while former American planners have written about the challenge of injecting fresh thinking when detached from decision‐making. Other planners were dragged into operational work or speechwriting. Many planners nonetheless enjoyed the opportunity to think more broadly. Policy planning can be intellectually rich without being the source of actionable strategic thinking about the long‐term national interest. This article suggests that a greater focus on people rather than systems might help to foster more strategic, anticipatory and innovative thinking about the national interest.     

Pressures on Urban Water Resources in Russia: The Case of St. Petersburg

An American geographer evaluates the process of water resources planning and management in the city of St. Petersburg, Russia, based on regional government documents, interviews with local water management officials, and follow-up field observations in 2007. St. Petersburg is a microcosm for challenges to assessing and managing water resources in urban environments in transition economies more broadly, and thus the present study yields insights into obstacles confronting water planners in many large cities in the post-Soviet realm, and augments the body of empirical data on the impacts of economic transition on environmental management. 3 figures, 46 references.     

Improving Coastal Vulnerability Assessment Methodologies for Integrated Coastal Zone Management: an Approach from South Australia

The global concern about human-induced climatic change and its potential effect on sea-level has dominated the debate on coastal vulnerability, particularly since a common assessment methodology was developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1991. There have been numerous attempts to use or adapt this methodology but the focus has remained on sea-level rise as the single most important issue for coastal vulnerability. This paper presents a revised and more holistic coastal vulnerability assessment methodology which incorporates spatial and temporal scales relevant to the predicted impacts of climatic change and current human-induced hazards. Three studies in contrasting coastal environments of South Australia demonstrate that there are significant regional variations in sea-level response, human-induced hazards and local planning issues and that these may present a greater immediate threat than the possibility of sea-level rise.     

Identification of limits and barriers to climate change adaptation: case study of two islands in Torres Strait,Australia

Communities living on remote islands are often viewed as among the most exposed and vulnerable to climate change impacts. This study uses the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework to investigate how indigenous communities living on two physically different islands in Torres Strait, Australia, experience what they consider to be the impacts of climate change in relation to their daily lives. During this process, a series of natural, physical, and socio‐cultural limits and barriers to climate change adaptation were identified on Boigu, a low‐lying mud island inundated by the sea during high tides and storm surges. As a volcanic island, Erub's elevation is higher but significant community infrastructure, housing, and cultural sites are located on the low coastal fringe. No immediate limits to climate change adaptation were identified on Erub, but physical and socio‐cultural barriers were revealed. Limits to climate change adaptation occur when adaptation actions fail to protect the things valued by those affected, or few adaptation options are available. Barriers to climate change adaptation may be overcome if recognised and addressed but can become entrenched limits if they are ignored. Within the participating communities, such limits and barriers included (a) restricted adaptation options due to limited access to particular livelihood assets; (b) difficulty engaging with government processes to secure external support; and (c) people's place‐based values, which evoke a reluctance to relocate or retreat.     

Go East,Young Cadre: Experiments in Inter‐Provincial Training of Party and State Managers in China

This article situates China's local policy experimentation in the broader context of policy experiments in decentralized political systems, through a case study which represents a local state response to China's transition to a market economy. With growing regional and urban–rural inequalities evident after the initial reform period (1978–1994), local party leaders of inland provinces devised strategies for addressing these inequalities and encouraging public–private sector mobility among party officials. County and township‐level leaders pursued local policy experiments in which they selected and sent officials to find private‐sector work in China's booming coastal cities. Initiated in the 1990s and peaking in the 2000s, these policy experiments and inter‐provincial transfers demonstrate the discretion that local officials possess to conduct programmatic/policy experiments in a unitary political system and show how officials resort to extra‐institutional strategies in order to bridge perceived knowledge gaps. The ultimate demise of these programmes illuminates the challenges to extra‐institutional policy innovations in transitioning states.     

Mixed-use ‘regeneration’ of employment land in the post-industrial city: challenges and realities in London

This article explores the relationships between land-use planning, property and economic development, with a focus on the changing attitudes towards employment land in post-industrial cities. Drawing on case study data from two London local authorities, it finds that planning authorities are moving away from protecting employment land to actively promoting the mixed-use redevelopment of employment sites, even when there are thriving businesses on these sites and a shortage of supply of employment premises and land, relative to demand. We examine the drivers for changing policy including the national and regional policy contexts, housing targets, the influence of austerity measures, rise of Neighbourhood Planning and changing conceptions of regeneration and the role of housing therein. The article highlights the complex task faced by local planners and the tensions involved in simultaneously finding sites for housing, fostering economic development and promoting mixed-use redevelopment in planning policy and decisions. We find that changes in policy are fuelling speculation for housing development on sites occupied by viable businesses, supporting rather than responding to deindustrialization. This is leading to a gap between aspirations for delivering mixed-use environments on hitherto employment sites and realities on the ground.     

Monitoring to Learn,Learning to Monitor: A Critical Analysis of Opportunities for Indigenous Community‐Based Monitoring of Environmental Change in Australian Rangelands

Indigenous community‐based monitoring has been a central feature in many international attempts to improve monitoring of and local adaptation to environmental change. Despite offering much promise, Indigenous community‐based monitoring has been underutilised in natural resource management in Australia, particularly within the remote, semi‐arid rangelands. This paper discusses contextual social and environmental factors that may help to explain this apparent deficiency, before critically analysing key stakeholder perceptions of the roles for, and challenges of monitoring in the Alinytjara Wilur ara Natural Resources Management region in the north‐west of South Australia. The analysis guides a discussion of responses to better integrate monitoring in general, and Indigenous community‐based monitoring in particular, into regional environmental management approaches. We argue that community‐based monitoring offers a range of benefits, including: better coordination between stakeholders; a heightened ability to detect and respond to climatic trends and impacts; the effective utilisation of Indigenous knowledge; employment opportunities for managing and monitoring natural resources; and improved learning and understanding of rangeland socio‐ecological systems. Identified opportunities for spatial and temporal community monitoring designed for the Alinytjara Wilur ara region could be of value to other remote rangeland and Indigenous institutions charged with the difficult task of monitoring, learning from, and responding to environmental change.     

A Multi‐disciplinary Approach to the Archaeological Investigation of a Bedrock‐Dominated Shallow‐Marine Landscape: an example from the Bay of Firth,Orkney, UK

Investigation of shallow‐marine environments for submerged prehistoric archaeology can be hampered in many localities by extensive bedrock exposure and thus limited preservation potential. Using the concept of ‘seamless archaeology’ where land‐based archaeology is integrated across the intertidal zone through to the offshore, a multi‐disciplinary approach is essential. This approach taken in the Bay of Firth, Orkney uses geophysics, historical archive and ethno‐archaeology, coastal geomorphology, palaeo‐environmental analyses and sea‐level science, and allows a clearer understanding of the landscape in which prehistoric settlers lived. While acknowledging the limitations of the preserved environment, we are successful in identifying areas of archaeological potential on the sea‐bed for both upstanding structural elements as well as sediment preservation that contains evidence for human occupation. This has wider implications beyond Orkney's World Heritage sites to provide a blueprint for similar studies elsewhere in the coastal zone. © 2012 The Authors     

Agricultural Adaptation to Real Regulation on the Urban Fringe: The Chicken Meat Industry's Response to Land‐use Conflict in the Western Port Region of Victoria,Australia

Research theorising the rural‐urban fringe has not focussed in detail on the regulatory system managing land‐use conflict, including disputes arising between agricultural enterprises and residential property owners. To explore local forms of regulation the need to identify relevant actors, their interrelationships and the way that they compete to influence decision‐makers is widely recognised in the literature. Moran et al.'s (1996) conceptualisation of ‘real regulation’, with its emphasis on lobbying by social actors and the (re)formulation of legislation, is identified as a theoretical perspective that can help to explain local forms of regulation. The understanding of patterns of regulation on the urban fringe requires a more detailed conceptualisation of non‐legislative forms of policy, and a greater appreciation of the different strategies adopted by farmers to influence government. This paper investigates how urban fringe agricultural industries have attempted to influence decision‐making within the development approval process. Evidence is presented from the Western Port region in the urban fringe of Melbourne, Victoria, where refusal for the construction of broiler sheds by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal has resulted in the chicken meat industry adopting a more scientific siting strategy. It is concluded that, whilst this provides an example of agricultural adaptation and reinforces the importance of adopting a temporal dimension to investigate the land development process, the possibility that government will assess environmental harm differently in the future leaves urban fringe broiler farming in a precarious position.     

Threading a needle: Kazakhstan between civic and ethno‐nationalist state‐building

This paper examines the state‐building project in Kazakhstan since independence in 1991. It argues that both civic and ethno‐nationalistic tendencies in state‐building can be identified but that it is not any particular trajectory of nationalism in Kazakhstan that is of significance so much as the tensions between two very different trajectories. We argue that, at least to date, the government has succeeded in managing these tensions quite effectively both at the policy level and in its relations with different ethnic groups and neighbouring states. Whether Kazakhstan can continue to manage these tensions in the post‐Nazarbayev era is one of the most significant questions facing the country.     

Ageing in remote and cyclone‐prone communities: geography,policy, and disaster relief

Focusing on the experience of independent‐living older adults, this study explored how those in regional Australian coastal communities have coped with repeated natural disasters. Using an exploratory, mixed‐method, and phenomenological approach, an array of non‐probability snowballing techniques was used to seek participation from residents aged 65 years or more, and from emergency services officers, disaster managers, and community health care providers located in regional communities affected by Cyclone Larry (2006) and Cyclone Yasi (2011). The research found that post‐disaster political decisions have had a negative long‐term impact on local economies, causing outmigration by those seeking employment, and resulting in many elderly residents facing a future without family support. As government policies encourage ageing‐in‐place by providing subsidised in situ care, increasingly older adults are remaining in exposed vulnerable locations, reliant on authorities for their survival both day‐to‐day and during an emergency. Findings also uncovered inconsistent disaster management policies between neighbouring local government councils and an unrealistic reliance on in situ care organisations by disaster managers during preparation and recovery stages of a natural hazard. These results highlight the need for those charged with emergency management to reassess both the future natural hazard adaptive capacities of ageing regional communities and policy responses to such challenges.     

Planning for Rural Housing in the Republic of Ireland: From National Spatial Strategies to Development Plans

This paper examines the role of spatial planning as a policy framework for managing rural housing within an integrated territorial development strategy. The paper focuses on the Republic of Ireland, which provides a useful case for analysing spatial planning and rural housing relationships, due to the State's recent shift towards spatial planning (formalized with the publication of the Irish National Spatial Strategy), as well as the level of housing construction that has been observed in an increasingly post-productivist countryside (triggered by counter-urbanization flows, increased affluence and demands for second holiday homes, etc.). The paper reviews all policy instruments that have been used to manage rural housing at various scales (from national strategies to local level development plans). It is argued that while spatial planning adopts an integrative vocabulary, as policy moves down the spatial scale hierarchy, multi-dimensional spatial goals are implemented through traditional, narrow land-use regulation. This often leads to rural housing being addressed in isolation from its wider social and economic context, disconnecting housing from wider rural community issues and ultimately failing to deliver a coordinated and coherent spatial policy for managing rural settlements.     

Climate change resilience in the Canadian Arctic: The need for collaboration in the face of a changing landscape

Human-induced changes to global climate have become increasingly difficult to ignore in recent years. As the frequency and severity of extreme weather events increases, the impacts on both natural and human systems are becoming difficult to manage with the current policies. In Canada, one of the most vulnerable regions to climate change is the Arctic, where temperatures are rising at a rate two to three times that of the global average. Warmer seasonal temperatures have led to melting permafrost and increased variability in sea ice conditions, which has contributed to a rise in coastal erosion. The ongoing resilience of Arctic communities will depend heavily on their ability to implement successful long-term adaptation policies. The development and implementation of any action on climate change adaptation should involve collaboration with local stakeholders in order to reflect the views and experience of those living in the Arctic.     

The specific domains of planning

An understanding of socio‐spatial processes is the source and the content of planners literacy, and may be considered a core of the planning education programme, but it is not sure that planners’ professional profiles may arise as specializations from that core. There are too many forms of planning to identify one specific planning domain. Moreover, in different contexts we experience different planning practices of a single form of planning, e.g. land‐use planning. Then, to identify a possible specific domain of land‐use planning, we should understand and reveal its technical commonalities within different planning contexts. This basic technical knowledge could be considered the best key for planners to enter the worlds of meanings and values and to participate in the polity debate.     

Issues and Opportunities in Planning and Managing Nature‐based Tourism in the Central Coast Region of Western Australia

Research reported here identified planning and management issues relating to integrated development of nature‐based tourism in the Central Coast Region of Western Australia. Stakeholder views were gauged through a workshop involving 45 people and a series of interviews. The workshop was also designed to stimulate interest in the establishment of a regionally, integrated tourism group to address any issues identified. Participants included members of the tourism industry, the community, and representatives of government and non‐government organisations. Seven individuals participated in interviews, including the chief executive officers of the local authorities and regional development commissions. The results indicate that the regional tourism industry is fragmented and uncoordinated, which is hindering regional development. Implementation of regional tourism planning is virtually non‐existent in the Central Coast, due to the lack of a regional tourism policy. Management of tourism resources is restricted by limited coordination between industry and government, and especially by inadequate resource provision to local authorities and land management agencies. An outcome of the workshop was the formation of a regionally integrated tourism group, the Turquoise Coast Sustainable Development Steering Committee, to implement recommendations arising from the workshop. However, the group has met with limited successes to date, owing to a range of political and sectoral issues beyond the scope of tourism planning. The research highlights difficulties in implementing collaborative tourism planning initiatives at the regional scale.     

Managing Conservation of the Built Heritage in Post‐socialist Budapest: Evidence from the Old Jewish Quarter

Like other Eastern European countries, Hungary has undergone processes of societal and economic restructuring since 1990. This has given rise to a changed cultural‐political context shaped by forces such as (re)privatisation, strengthening of local government and growth of civil movements. This has led to new opportunities as well as challenges for managing conservation of the built heritage. In Budapest, protection of the built heritage is achieved either through state protection of outstanding ‘monuments’ or through conservation objectives dictated by planning authorities within a two‐tiered local government system. These different levels of conservation authority can sometimes lead to conflicting approaches, as in the case of recent urban renewal in the Old Jewish Quarter. This paper examines the approach to urban conservation taken in Budapest at the various official levels, as well as organised initiatives by the voluntary sector in the light of post‐socialism and associated cultural change.     

Household growth,housing demand and new settlements in Scotland

The question of how and where to accommodate the increasing number of households in Scotland represents a major challenge for policy makers and planners at the beginning of the twenty‐first century. The present research identifies the projected level and geographical incidence of household growth and housing demand in Scotland, identifies the principal alternative options for urban development and, within the context of the current policy and planning environment, assesses the potential contribution of a new settlement strategy to meet the challenge of urban development in contemporary Scotland.