Environmental and Climate-Resilience Planning

Course overview

A programme on integrating environmental evidence and climate risk into planning work: identifying constraints, understanding flood and drainage behaviour, and shaping layouts and phasing so that risk is reduced by design rather than mitigated late.

Who it is for

• Planning professionals
• Public-sector and agency teams
• Engineers and surveyors
• Researchers and academics

What participants will learn

• Assemble an environmental evidence base for a site or area
• Interpret flood, drainage and climate-risk information
• Apply resilience thinking to layout and land-use decisions
• Document environmental reasoning within planning outputs

Curriculum outline

1. Module 1

   Environmental evidence

   • Constraint mapping: hydrology, vegetation, slope and soils
   • Data sources, gaps and their limitations

2. Module 2

   Risk and resilience

   • Flood and drainage behaviour at site and catchment scale
   • Climate-related risks in a planning context
   • Nature-based and layout-led responses

3. Module 3

   Application

   • Resilience-informed layout decisions
   • Recording assumptions and residual risk

Expected practical outcomes

• An environmental constraints plan for a sample site
• A layout adjustment note responding to identified risk
• A clear method for documenting environmental reasoning

Prerequisites

• Basic mapping literacy; GIS experience is useful but not required