Speaker
Description
Biodiversity conservation and enhancement are increasingly central to urban and regional planning, yet a significant gap remains in understanding how local planning authorities translate high-level policies into effective practices at the city and project levels. While much of the existing research has focused on mapping biodiversity, ecosystem services, and ecological conditions using geospatial models, this study examines how development is managed to mitigate biodiversity loss and promote ecosystem services. Using a three-tiered framework encompassing the high level (national and regional policy), city level (local development plans, master plans and zoning), and implementation level (planning application and consent), this paper analyses the practices of planning authorities in five cities: Manchester (England), Bologna (Italy), Calgary (Canada), Frankfurt (Germany), and Ghent (Belgium). The findings reveal that while all cities share the ambition of protecting biodiversity in urban areas, they adopt different approaches shaped by their planning systems, development cultures, and legal-political contexts. Regulatory planning systems, such as those in Canada, Germany and Belgium, are characterised by prescriptive frameworks that establish certainty through comprehensive plans. Conversely, discretionary systems, such as those in England, emphasise flexibility and the ability to adapt to individual circumstances at the application stage. However, approaches to biodiversity conservation do not always align with these system types. For example, despite Belgium’s plan-focused and regulatory planning system, planners adopt a largely discretionary approach to biodiversity at the application stage, enabling measures to be tailored to specific development projects. Additionally, we find that tools such as England’s mandatory Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) requirement influence biodiversity planning processes significantly, providing measurable outcomes but requiring long-term commitments. By contrast, Frankfurt’s plan-led approach integrates biodiversity fully into zoning decisions, leaving little room for application-level discretion. These differences highlight how governance systems, local priorities, and planning cultures interact to shape biodiversity outcomes. This study provides critical insights into the effectiveness and challenges of integrating biodiversity into urban planning and offers lessons for fostering coherent biodiversity goals across governance levels to improve urban biodiversity outcomes.
| Keywords | Biodiversity Conservation; Urban Development; Mitigation Hierarchy; Development Management; Comparative Analysis. |
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