Remember the Flicking Tail of the Lizard: how matauranga Maori is being woven into place-based regulatory decisions in Aotearoa. Te Mana Rauhï Taiao, the Environmental Protection Authority, is adopting a new and comprehensive approach to bringing mätauranga – the Mäori knowledge system – into its regulatory practice. This will potentially have an impact on decision-making on environmental protection in your local area.

The twenty first century has seen a rapid rise of urbanization and consumption, bringing many challenges to cities, including one of the most difficult challenges of our time - climate change. Climate change has exacerbated many natural hazards including storm surges, extreme precipitation, flooding, and sea level rise causing the loss of thousands of lives each year in addition to billions of dollars in damage. Coastal cities are especially at risk due to their vulnerable geographical location and rapid population growth. Cities also face other environmental challenges including earthquakes, tsunamis and hurricanes; which are often difficult to predict and can test a city’s resilience. This research analyzes the environmental hazards a coastal city may face and discuss the tools planners can use to increase a region’s resilience. Case studies of New Zealand and Vancouver Island, Canada are used to analyze disaster management and resilience strategies.

Local government have a pivotal role in city planning. However, meeting the conflicting priorities such as plan for urbanization, promote economic prosperity, ensure environmental sustainability besides creating safe, vibrant and liveable places, create major challenges for local administration. While rapid urbanization continue to displace people from their local places, the frequency of disaster events at the local scale and increasing disaster risks place unique challenges on people and their places. This emphasises the need for local government to understand the local places and invest in planning for cities that improve resilience and enhance human connectivity to their places. Meeting these multidimensional needs in local spaces require embedding local and scientific knowledge, past experiences and community expectation to plan and design cities that also deliver multiple social outcomes. Both place-based approach to city planning and creating disaster resilient cities have gathered momentum, however, they continue to occur in isolation. Maximizing these multiple social, environmental and economic outcomes, emphasize the need to align both resilience principles for sustainable urbanization and place based approach planning concepts to plan for places for people. Drawing from these principles and organizational change theory, a conceptual framework is proposed that provide a new lens for local government to plan for place based resilient cities. This place based approach for resilient cities framework incorporates the thinking for change as a dynamic process across the time scales and by understanding the relationship between people and their place. The model proposed is in an Australian context, yet has significant implication for communities at all levels when planning for places for people.

In the IMFG Perspectives Paper (No. 16), Reducing Urban Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Effective Steering Strategies for City Governments, Sara Hughes reviews the unique strategies of three cities leading the charge: Toronto, New York City, and Los Angeles. The paper identifies three strategies that have proven effective: Building and maintaining a broad-based coalition of governmental and non-governmental actors working toward a common goal; Investing in capacity-building, data collection, and education; and Embedding new ideas, financial tools, and standards into local formal and informal decision-making institutions. “Cities are critical climate change actors, and will be for the foreseeable future,” says Hughes. “Given the jurisdictional and financial constraints local governments face, their climate change goals will demand creative partnerships, new tools and systems, and innovative institutional cultures.” This paper is part of a series of IMFG publications and events focusing on cities and climate change.

Dr Debra Roberts of eThekwini Municipality, Durban, South Africa, gives the 2016 Barbara Ward Lecture. She called for more to be done to join the dots between the 'New Urban Agenda', being prepared for Habitat III, and the realities of implementation at the local level.