Browsing by Author "Grover, Himanshu"
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Item Local Response to Global Climate Change: The Role of Local Development Plans in Climate Change Management(2011-10-21) Grover, HimanshuClimate change is possibly the greatest threat facing human society in this century. The response to this challenge has been dominated by international negotiations for controlling greenhouse gas emissions. More recently there are efforts by the international community to engage other levels of governance in mitigation and adaptation response. While the framework for international action on climate change continues to evolve, there is mounting pressure from researchers to include cities as significant actors in the global climate change management strategy. Cities are centers of production and consumption in our society and as such will be crucial for global climate change management strategy. Despite these links, demands for consideration of climate change management issues in local policy making have remained a research rhetoric and have not yet translated into planning action. This gap between planning research and practice is probably due to lack of evidence based research on this issue. This study fills in this gap and provides empirical evidence supporting the key role of local development plans in climate change management. Specifically, in the first step, this research investigates the influence of local development plans on climate change mitigation by comparing change in carbon dioxide emissions in groups of cities with and without plans. Thereafter, climate change management capacity in local development plans is analyzed through policy analysis. Finally, this research study examines the effect of plan quality on the change in carbon dioxide emissions, while controlling for socio-economic, landscape and policy characteristics. Results of this study support the demands for using local development plans as tools for climate change management. This study identifies numerous planning policies in local development plans with potential to influence climate change management. The analysis also reveals wide variation in the quality of the climate change management policies. For example, policies related to site planning regulations and transportation are fairly detailed, whereas acquisition and incentive/disincentive tools are not. The detailed review of plan quality suggests that although development plans have the potential to significantly influence climate change, there is need for further improvement, especially of the overall plan implementation capacity. Finally, the research findings show that the quality of climate change management planning policies in local development plans have a significant impact on a communities? emissions. Communities with better plan quality had significantly lower increase in per-capita emissions over the period of analysis. The study also discovered significant effects of wealth, travel behavior, occupation base and state policy on the change in emissions. Based on the research findings this study recommends evolving integrated local development policies that focus on dual goals of climate change management and sustainable development. Further studies are recommended to examine the opportunities and challenges to use of local development plans for climate change management.Item Planning for mitigating climate change risk to metropolitan areas (USA)(2009-06-02) Grover, HimanshuIn the last couple of decades, there has been increasing evidence of changes in global climate. With urban areas identified as the primary contributors to the climate change, there is an impetus for initiatives to persuade major contributors of greenhouse gases to undertake policy measures for climate change mitigation. The support for such initiatives at the international level has been mixed with many nations, including the United States, not accepting the Kyoto protocol. In view of the evident disagreement at the international level, initiatives promoting local communities to adopt self regulating policies for climate change mitigation have gained importance. One such initiative is the Cities for Climate Protection (CCP) supported by the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives. This research explores the differences in the socio-economic and civic characteristics of metropolitan areas in the contiguous United States that have committed to CCP (as a policy measure for climate change mitigation) to those that have not. The data in this study has been primarily collected from the census documents and government publications. The indicators are grouped into risk, stress and civic variables. The differences amongst the metropolitan areas with CCP committed jurisdictions and those with non-committed jurisdictions have been analyzed through statistical t-tests and use of geographical information system (GIS). The research reveals that metropolitan areas with a higher degree of risk are more likely to commit to climate change mitigation policies whereas those with higher stress index are less likely to commit. The metropolitan areas with higher civic index were also found more likely to commit to policy measures for climate change mitigation. The results of the study are significant as they reveal that communities that are at risk are not necessarily adding to the climate stress and those contributing the most to the climatic stress are not committed to climate change mitigation. The results of the study support the need to discontinue the closed box approach and instead adopt an approach with vertical integration. Cooperation and coordination amongst the hierarchical aggregate levels of communities, from a place to a region, are imperative for effective implementation of climate mitigation initiatives.