ABSTRACT
Responding to climate change by mitigating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and adapting to the impacts of climate change is placing new and complex demands upon decision makers. The discipline of planning has always been one of dealing with multiple objectives and constraints over extended timescales. Climate change adds greatly to this challenge for a number of reasons. First, is the urgent need to mitigate GHG emissions (Stern, 2007). In the context of the built environment, this implies rapid introduction of energy efficient technologies and, more significantly, transformation of the existing building stock (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2007; White, 2000). It implies phasing out of fossil-fuel based transport systems, upon which we are now more or less dependent.
