ENVIRONMENTALIST Dr Kwame Emmanuel has rapped successive regional governments for ignoring scientific data in their drafting and execution of planning policies, the result of which he said has been costly.

“[There is] a disconnect between political agendas and climate change timelines, a lack of identification and quantification of future land use requirements, and insufficient use of scientific data in decision making,” he charged.

“The region has spent the last generation trying to solve many difficult and costly problems; problems that could have been easily prevented with proper planning,” he continued.

Dr Emmanuel, who was speaking at a recent forum hosted by the Jamaican Institute of Architects and titled ‘Rethinking Public Sector Construction in Jamaica’, is the technical review consultant on the Developing Design Concepts for Climate Change Resilient Buildings’ Build Better Jamaica project. He noted that while there are some policies in place which promote maintenance and regulation of the natural environment, including flood control, groundwater replenishment and climate regulation, there needs to be more synergy in the overall planning strategy.

He said, too, that there needs to be greater enforcement of planning and environmental regulations and a “mainstreaming of resilience into all sectors”, including tourism and housing.

In a recent study he undertook, Dr Emmanuel found that “policies have to be modified to address current climatic projections, processes have to be modernised to facilitate effective integrated planning and institutions have to be adequately resourced”, especially as it relates to enforcement of regulations.

The primary benefits of a revamped planning system, he pointed out, are better spatial coordination of land use and improved building designs, which will help increase the resilience of the building stock of Jamaica and the Caribbean.

The consultant’s views are in line with those of former President of the Commonwealth Association of Planners Christine Platt, who said “we have had social upheaval, the diseconomies of retrofitting infrastructure and the avoidable costs of rehabilitating settlements after natural disasters when instead, we should have been planning for new sustainable urban settlement and hazard mitigation”.

Build Better Jamaica is headed by professors Anthony Clayton and Tara Dasgupta of the Institute of Sustainable Development at the University of the West Indies (UWI). The project is funded by the Inter-American Development Bank with additional support from UWI.