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Spatial and land use planning

Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) helps to balance economic, social, and environmental interests from the first  stages of the spatial planning and decision-making process. SEA can add value in multiple ways.

  • Strategic Environmental Assessment, helps to harmonise decision-making across different governance levels (national, sub-national, local and even transboundary) and to strengthen and consolidate their joint action.
  • SEA, particularly when applied in conjunction with the layers approach, facilitates the development of alternatives ways of land use that are more resilient to climate change and that restore biodiversity.
  • SEA can link spatial planning (where?) to socio-economic development strategies (what?) and highlights where (paper) ambitions are likely to come into conflict in the available area. SEA also helps to identify alternative socio-economic livelihoods and development pathways in these strategies.
  • SEA helps to bring together all relevant stakeholders, both land-based and stakeholders representing other interests, in the initial planning stages, contributing to better integrated, more effective, and broader supported decisions.
  • An SEA-informed spatial plan is well-positioned to guide subsequent project investments that are environmentally friendly and socially acceptable.

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