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In 1994, Sunpine Forest Products Ltd. sought permits from Alberta government to construct a permanent log hauling road and approvals from the federal government for construction of required bridges associated with the road. A concerned citizens group challenged the Federal Government's subsequent bridge approvals in court, claiming that cumulative effects assessment was not adequately conducted under Canadian Environmental Assessment Act. The original Sunpine court decision agreed with the citizen group that the federal government erred in law by not including related projects and adequately considering associated cumulative effects, sending the approval back to the federal government for reconsideration. Government regulators, industrial foresters, and environmental groups across Canada awaited the appeal to the Sunpine federal court decision. The Sunpine Appeal reversed the original position with much relief from industry and government. The Sunpine case raises important issues about how federal and provincial authorities address environmental impacts, uncertainty in scoping assessments, factors to be considered, and cumulative effect assessments. This paper evaluates the cumulative effects assessment processes followed in the Sunpine case study under the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act within an analysis framework of comprehensiveness, fairness, efficiency, and effectiveness. Land use planning models, like the British Columbia land resource management plans and Mackenzie Valley Resource Management Act, offer alternative approaches to legislated cumulative effects processes. Sustainability may be better realised with a combination of strategic environmental assessment tools, utilising environmental assessment at the project-level within the context of a regional resource planning process.

The lack of early integration with the planning and decision-making process has been a major problem in environmental assessment. Traditional project-based environmental impact assessment has inadequate incentives and capacities to incorporate critical environmental impacts at a broader temporal or spatial scale. While many applications have been geared towards implementing project-level environmental assessments, comparatively little research has been done to determine how to incorporate strategically critical environmental impacts into local comprehensive land use planning. Although the principles of strategic environmental assessment (SEA) are not yet required in local comprehensive land use planning in the United States, these principles create a theoretical framework for local environmental assessment. This study builds a theoretical framework for more effectively integrating the principles of strategic environmental assessment into local comprehensive land use plans. The empirical case study results indicate that California local jurisdictions did not fully integrated the SEA principles into their local plans.

The ecosystem services criteria for strategic decision-making combine conceptualisation and concretisation of ecologically sustainable development. A concrete basis for the measurement, valuation, and assessment of ecological sustainability was created through the development of two-level criteria for ecosystem services, which were linked to indicators based on spatial and statistical data from the Monitoring System of Spatial Structure (MSSS) and the CORINE Land Cover database. The criteria were designed for middle-sized urban regions because urban areas face the greatest land changes, threats, and management and co-operation needs related to maintenance of ecosystem services. Two urban regions were piloting the criteria in an iterative process between researchers and project groups of urban planners. Data availability and poor capacity to deliver data for the regions affected the choice of final indicators. This highlights the need for development of planning tools for practical planning and impact assessment for ecological sustainability of all urban regions.

There is an increasing demand for environmental leadership in the planning process. In collaborative planning models, planners have a distinct role as a bridge between citizens, politicians, and scientists. However, there is limited research evaluating the leadership role of planners in the process of creating high quality environmental plans for local jurisdictions. This study proposes and tests a conceptual model with measurable indicators of planners' use of leadership to facilitate the creation of plans that can benefit the environment. This paper examined two distinct roles for planners: as an information source and as a facilitator. The descriptive results suggest that planners are exercising limited environmental leadership in local land use planning. The explanatory results highlight that the key to improve planners' leadership abilities lies with increasing planning capacity. Several policy recommendations are provided to improve planner's use of leadership processes in environmental planning and management.

Lack of comprehensive land use planning in India has posed significant challenges in achieving more optimal utilisation of land resources. This has also limited the opportunities for developing land use plans that adequately reflect the rationale and objectives of planning. This calls for developing a comprehensive and holistic approach to review the compatibility of actions associated with development plans involving multiple sectors with the ground realities. This paper is an attempt to apply strategic environmental assessment (SEA) as a promising tool to identify environmental risks and deficiencies in the land use planning process in India. The paper draws on the experience of applying SEA to Gurgaon-Manesar Development Plan for 2031 and elaborates on the merits and usefulness of adopting SEA in land use planning in the Indian context.

A new treatment is presented for land use planning problems by means of extremal optimization (EO) in conjunction to cell-based neighborhood local search. EO, inspired by self-organized critical models of evolution has been applied mainly to the solution of classical combinatorial optimization problems. Cell-based local search has been employed by the author elsewhere in problems of spatial resource allocation in combination with genetic algorithms and simulated annealing. In this paper, it complements EO in order to enhance its capacity for a spatial optimization problem. The hybrid method thus formed is compared to methods of the literature on a specific resource allocation problem by taking into account both the development and the transportation cost. It yields better results both in terms of objective function values and in terms of compactness. The latter is an important quantity for spatial planning and its meaning is discussed. The appearance of significant compactness values as emergent results is investigated.