Land use and land management

Environmental planners work at the interface between humans and the landscape. They are responsible, more than many others in our communities, for determining how the population interacts with the biophysical environment. Ultimately, planners' choices and decisions can influence the success of land use and land conservation policies. Land use planning and management in urban areas is characterised by a number of challenges, including, but not limited to: (1) balancing competing land use objectives and making complex trade-offs; (2) accounting for cumulative, non-linear impacts- where the overall impact of multiple decisions may be much greater than the sum of the individual impacts; (3) planning for the future while acknowledging the legacy of environmental damage from past land use; and (4) reconciling desire for certainty in planning policy with the uncertainty that is typical in natural environmental processes. In this chapter, we encourage environmental planners to see the landscape not as a canvas on which to design new suburbs, communities and infrastructure, but instead as a living, dynamic combination of climates, soils and biota that should form the basis for sustainable planning. We begin the chapter by highlighting the importance of the natural environment and biogeochemical processes for land use planning. Next we describe the practice of environmental planning in a landscape context, focusing on strategic approaches, information requirements and planning tools. Finally, we discuss policies and tools designed to address landscape a planning issues in Australia.