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Integrating planning for urban development with conservation of nature is one of the major challenges facing landuse planners today.
LANNING for the Conservation of Nature in Florida: Current Trends, Future Opportunities By: Pam Pannozzo, Ph.D. and Reed Noss, Ph.D.
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ver the next 25 years, in response to rapid human population growth, the amount of developed land in the United States is projected to increase by 79% - more than 44 million acres - primarily for housing. Unbridled urban development increasingly disassociates natural lands from their ecological functions, such as fire, and fragments existing conservation lands. With no national land-use or conservation policy in the United States, growth management is governed by state and local governments. States, however, vary widely in their growth management regulatory frameworks. Only a quarter of U.S. states have growth management laws that require local governments to protect nature through local land-use planning. Therefore, most landuse decisions affecting development and biodiversity protection are local and fall in the hands of local planning departments. A concern of conservationists is that uncoordinated local land-use decisions results
16 Summer 2014 / Florida Planning
in a collection of activities that negatively impact and degrade the broader ecological landscape. The state of Florida was a national leader in conservation planning from the 1970s until recently because of its ambitious state conservation lands acquisitions program and relatively strict growth management laws. Nevertheless, studies suggest that even where state law requires local governments to plan for environmental protection, local conservation planning tends to be highly variable in quality and implementation. Researchers from the Science and Planning in Conservation Ecology (SPICE) Lab at the University of Central Florida conducted a survey of Florida county planning departments to assess the status of local conservation planning and its variability across counties. The study found that in most cases conservation planning focused on protecting tracts of land and employed species lists, habitat maps, continued on next page