Policy

This guide is a resource for community-based organizations (CBOs) and city residents to advance equitable development through active engagement in the City of Los Angeles community plan update process.

• Part I Provides an overview of the community plan update process and offers key considerations for effective community engagement.
• Part II Provides a toolkit of planning and policy tools to advance equitable development outcomes within these new community plans. These tools are organized according to five broad principles of equitable development.

This guide is non-exhaustive, and meant to spur thoughtful dialogue among engaged residents and organizations. Ultimately, it is the leadership and experiential knowledge of affected low-income communities that will drive an equitable community plan campaign. Specific strategies will be responsive to the unique circumstances and dynamics of each community plan area. This guide is intended to support that effort.

A growing evidence base links women’s met needs for family planning with reduced human vulnerability to climate change and enhanced resilience in the face of climate change impacts. Yet to date, population and family planning have been largely left out of adaptation proposals and projects. This report highlights a number of multilateral funds that provide climate finance and identifies challenges and opportunities for the FP/RH community in justifying their proposed development interventions as adaptation interventions.

There is a growing recognition of the benefits of nature-based solutions (NBS), a term that refers to projects and actions where natural ecosystems and their services are used in a sustainable and effective way in order to help tackle environmental and social challenges. Under the right circumstances, these solutions can provide alternatives that, compared with traditional infrastructure and engineering projects, are both cost-effective and capable of providing multiple benefits, while at the same time delivering conservation objectives. NBS can help society better adapt to climate change by, for example, addressing the risks of adverse impacts from extreme weather events, including droughts and floods, as well as food security issues. One example of NBS is use of the buffering capacity of riparian ecosystems, which act as a time and intensity buffer in the event of floods, but also as a filter for runoff waters. Nevertheless, it is essential to frame NBS within the right conditions; recent developments in ecological science and modelling have just started to provide a better understanding of what a “good operating space”—in other words, one that efficiently delivers these services—looks like for NBS.

The Regional Plan, as adopted in 2006, emphasized a balanced approach to development and established targets for directing housing growth over the life of the Regional Plan (2006-2031). Twenty-five percent of the growth was to be directed to the Regional Centre (Peninsula Halifax and Dartmouth between the Circumferential Highway and Halifax Harbour); fifty percent directed to the urban communities (communities serviced with publicly managed water and wastewater services outside the Regional Centre) and the remaining twenty-five percent to the rural areas.

In preparing the first five year review of the Plan, the Stantec Quantifying Study was commissioned to assess the public, private and social costs and benefits of various growth scenarios from 2011 to 2031. That Study also considered how these scenarios may impact our environment, health and social well-being and benchmarked HRM with other Canadian and US municipalities to assist in this evaluation.