How to Create and Implement Healthy General Plans

How can public health advocates and city planners work together to create healthy, sustainable communities? This toolkit provides a progression of steps focused on the general plan, the key land use policy document for California cities and counties. The toolkit details a wide range of strategies, from building relationships and assessing existing conditions to creating and ultimately implementing policy language. Model health language is included to provide specific ideas for how to address health concerns through general plan policies.


How to Create and Implement Healthy General Plans
Introduction

Section I: Laying the Groundwork for Healthy Planning
Getting Started
Roles for Health Officers and Planners

Section II: Assessing Existing Health Conditions
Questions for a Baseline Community Health Assessment
Walkability and Bikeability Audits
Community Food Assessments

Section III: Writing a Healthy General Plan
The General Plan as a Tool for Change
A Separate Health Element?
Using Standards to Implement Health Goals

Section IV: Model Health Language

Section V: Implementation Plans, Programs, Policies, and Standards
Zoning, Neighborhood Plans, and Development Standards
Road Designs and Standards
Master Plans
Project Review
Taxes and Fees: Financing Healthy Infrastructure

Conclusion

Appendix: Fact Sheets - Research on Land Use and Health from Two Different Perspectives
The Health Perspective on Planning: Built Environments as Determinants of Health
The Planning Perspective on Health: Community Health as a Goal of Good Design

Biofuels for Transport: Global Potential and Implications for Sustainable Agriculture and Energy in the 21st Century

Biofuels for Transport: Global Potential and Implications for Sustainable Agriculture and Energy in the 21st Century

Worldwatch Institute
ISBN 978-1-84407-422-8
Hardback
480 pages

Biofuels for Transport provides a one-stop resource for understanding the complete scope of impacts from large scale production of biofuels.

“Biofuels for Transport is an insightful and timely study of how biofuels can reach their potential to strengthen energy security, promote economic development, and protect the environment. This much-needed analysis will benefit both policymakers and practitioners.”
— Senator Richard Lugar

“A compelling synthesis of the current and future trends in biofuels, with a thorough assessment of actions that must be taken to ensure the sustainable development of t his industry.”
—Amory Lovins, Chairman and Chief Scientist, Rocky Mountain Institute

“An essential treatment of this vital subject.”
—Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, USA





CONTENTS

Part I Status and Global Trends

Currrent Status of the Biofuel Industry and Markets
Liquid Biofuels: A Primer
First-Generation Feedstocks
Part II New Technologies, Crops and Prospects

Next-Generation Feedstocks
New Technologies for Converting Biomass into Liquid Fuels
Long-Term Biofuel Production Potentials
Part III Key Economic and Energy Security

Economic and Energy Security
Implications for Agriculture and Rural Development
International Trade in Biofuels
Part IV Key Environmental Isssues

Energy Balances of Current and Future Biofuels
Effects on Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Climate Stablility
Environmental Impacts of Feedstock Production
Environmental Impacts of Processing, Transport and Use
Part V Market Introduction and Technology Strategies

Infrastructure Requirements
Vehicle and Engine Technologies
Transfer of Technology and Expertise
Part VI The Policy Framework

Biofuel Policies Around the World
Standards and Certification Schemes
Part VII Recommendations

Recommendations for Decision-Makers
Part VIII Country Studies

Biofuels for Transportation in China
Biofuels for Transportation in India
Biofuels for Transportation in Tanzania
Biofuels for Transportation in Brazil
Biofuels for Transportation in Germany

Worldwatch State of the World 2007; Chapter 7: Charting a New Course for Urban Public Health

Worldwatch State of the World 2007
Chapter 7: Charting a New Course for Urban Public Health
by Carolyn Stephens and Peter Stair

For millions of people around the world, cities are places of hope and growth, but also despair and death. For a tiny minority, cities and towns are meccas of long life, health, and even luxury. F or the majority of urban residents, however, they offer the hope of opportunity but are often only home to pollution, disease, and insecurity.

As people move into low-income settlements that are vaster and denser than ever before, they are struggling to prosper in environments at least as challenging as the cities of Victorian Europe. These are places unable to draw in enough fresh water or to channel excrement away safely. Residents live in dilapidated, intensely crowded homes. They have little access to health services, and few are able to get the education or jobs that could raise them out of their situation. Although cities have gained a reputation as healthy places to live, the urban poor often have higher rates of infant deaths and under-five mortality than their rural counterparts.

Our urban future needs creative new solutions. Equity is perhaps the key to the more complex social problems of cities—and it also can lead toward sustainability. A city where all residents live together in peace, sharing the same spaces and the same resources, is far from today’s urban reality. A city where people think of the next generation and the planet as a whole is also far from this reality. But neither vision is impossible—either to imagine or to achieve.

Carolyn Stephens is a senior lecturer in environment and health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and a visiting professor in the Federal University of Paraná in Brazil. Peter Stair, a former MAP Fellow at Worldwatch Institute, is a Master’s candidate in the Department of City and Regional Planning, University of California–Berkeley.

Worldwatch State of the World 2006; Chapter 4: Cultivating Renewable Alternatives to Oil

Worldwatch State of the World 2006
Chapter 4: Cultivating Renewable Alternatives to Oil
by Suzanne C. Hunt and Janet L. Sawin with Peter Stair

Fueled by a powerful combination of advancing technologies, rising environmental concerns, farmer support, and soaring oil prices, biofuels are poised to become an import part of the world’s energy future. Biofuels are made from plant matter—from sugarcane, for instance, or soybeans—and other renewable feedstocks. The most widely used transport biofuels are ethanol and biodiesel, with ethanol currently accounting for more than 90 percent of global biofuel production. (See Figures 4-1 and 4-2, pp. 62-63.)

The combustion of biofuels results in far lower emissions of several pollutants, including carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, sulfur dioxide, and particulate matter, than burning petroleum fuels would. Also, unlike fossil fuels—which contain carbon stored for millennia beneath Earth’s surface and which release enormous amounts of greenhouse gases when burned—biofuels have the potential to be “carbon-neutral” over their life cycles. Furthermore, large-scale and widespread demand for biofuels could offer new markets for farm and forest products as well as new jobs and industries in rural areas.

The wide range of potential benefits from the large-scale use of biofuels is creating unusual coalitions of political support among groups often at odds: farmers who are seeking new markets, oil executives who want to remain in the energy business for the long term, environmentalists opposed to the polluting impacts of fossil fuels, and pacifists and military hawks who fear that dependence on unreliable sources of oil is undermining national security. Policymakers have a significant role to play in promoting innovative approaches to ensure that the benefits of a biobased economy are maximized while the risks are minimized. (See Table 4-3, p. 75.)

Special Focus, China & India

Box 4-1: China’s Ambition to Farm Energy, p. 66

Box 4-2: Will Ethanol and Biodiesel Bring Prosperity to More of India?, p. 67

Suzanne Hunt is Project Manager for the Worldwatch Institute’s Biofuels Program. Janet Sawin is a Senior Researcher and the Director of the Energy and Climate Change Program at the Institute. Peter Stair is a Research Assistant at the Institute.