Innovative land use planning for natural hazard risk reduction: A consequence-driven approach from New Zealand (original) (raw)

The traditional land use planning approach for addressing natural hazards in New Zealand has been based on the likelihood of an event occurring, with little consideration of the consequences associated with natural hazard events. This has led to decisions that place developments and communities at risk. Local government planning authorities who want to transition to risk-based planning face a number of challenges, including: how to satisfactorily define acceptable, tolerable and intolerable risk; how to incorporate the views of stakeholders and affected communities; and how to ensure that potentially controversial decisions over land use options are robust and defensible. This paper describes a practical innovation in land use planning that assists local and regional scale planners incorporate risk into land use planning decisions. Termed the 'Risk-Based Planning Approach' (RBPA), the objective of this framework is to provide local government planners with a process that responds to the key challenges they face in adopting a risk-based approach. It includes strategies to guide engagement and communication with key stakeholders both across local government and with affected communities; it supports a full assessment of the consequences, as well as likelihood, of natural hazard events; and it enables natural hazard policies to be monitored for their effectiveness in either holding-the-line or in reducing risks. In this paper we review how the RBPA provides for innovation in land use planning. In particular we note how its development with input from planners has ensured its applicability and consistency with statutory planning requirements and we examine an early case of its use in practice. This case demonstrates how a regional planning agency further innovated based on the RBPA, to provide robust and defensible decisions around acceptable, tolerable and intolerable levels of risk for their region.

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Reporting on the seminar - Risk Interpretation and Action (RIA): Decision Making Under Conditions of Uncertainty

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