93% of local plans prioritise climate change – but more than a quarter lack a strategic climate policy

There is a significant gap between local authorities’ climate ambitions and the planning policies needed to deliver them, according to new research by the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) and the Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA).

The report, Local Plans and the Climate Crisis: The Gap Between Ambition and Action in England, finds that while 93% of emerging local plans identify tackling climate change as a strategic objective, more than a quarter (28%) still fail to include a strategic climate change policy.

The research builds on the RTPI and TCPA’s joint Planning for the Climate Crisis guide, which sets out practical planning approaches local authorities can use to tackle climate change through the planning system.

The report argues that planning is one of the UK’s most powerful tools for delivering climate action, with local plans influencing how places are designed, where homes are built, how people travel and how communities adapt to increasing climate risks.

The report finds progress in several areas, including policies addressing overheating, whole-life carbon and water efficiency. However, with climate change moving faster than planning policy, many local authorities simply aren’t doing enough to address it.

The research represents one of the first large-scale uses of artificial intelligence to analyse climate policy across England’s local plans.

The report was produced collaboratively by the RTPI, the TCPA, The Planner, and planning technology company Landstack.

The researchers used Landstack’s AI-powered research tool to assess every adopted and emerging local plan in England against eighteen climate policy indicators drawn from the RTPI and TCPA’s Planning for the Climate Crisis guidance.

Researchers noted that the AI-assisted approach was experimental. Results were refined through prompt testing and spot-checking before being applied across the national dataset.

A detailed feature exploring the report’s findings and methodology will be published in the July/August edition of The Planner magazine.

Dr Daniel Slade, Heads of Research and Practice at the RTPI, said: “Climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity. Its risks and consequences can often feel existential and impossible to manage. But the tools for decarbonisation and adaptation exist. While this report shows the work of local authorities has some way to go in tackling this challenge, we can also see the positive signs of progression, with more than three quarters of local plans using strategic climate policies.

“In this report, we are experimenting with new AI tools, to understand their capabilities and limitations and learn how they can be incorporated effectively within a planner’s day-to-day work.”

Celia Davis, Interim Director of Operations and Impact at the TCPA, said: “This report shows that whilst there has been progress on coverage of climate change policies in local plans, there is still a long way to go to keep pace with the rapidly changing climate.

“As we await the publication of the updated National Planning Policy Framework, there is a clear opportunity for the government to put climate resilience at the heart of planning policy. However, as consulted, the NPPF will act as a brake on local progress and risks undermining the many authorities that want to build sustainable homes designed to avoid overheating and reduce energy bills.”

Jos Pink, Managing Director, Landstack, said: “Analysing every adopted and emerging local plan in England against eighteen indicators would have taken a research team months, at significant cost.

“Through this project we can see that AI could make a genuinely national evidence base possible for the first time. This could also be a ‘live’ system, updating and changing with new publications and policy changes.

“The implication of this for planning is significant, policy-makers can now see what local plans actually say, at scale, and monitor how national policy changes play out on the ground. This project is only the beginning of what expert-led AI research can do for the planning system.”

Simon Wicks, editor of The Planner, said: “This has been a really useful exercise that’s given us quite a deep insight into a crucial aspect of local planning policy in England. What we see from the analysis is that the very good intentions of plans can easily be undermined if the full suite of policies aren’t in play.

“This is an important finding and ought to give local planning authorities pause for thought and the incentive to revisit their climate policies to make sure they’re effective as well as aspirational. Now we need to find out how well these policies are working in practice – but that’s an even more complex piece of work.”