The Washington Chapter of the APA is offering a training series on climate change and sustainability issues. For those who can't make it to the University of Washington, the sessions will be available as webcasts for three months after they take place.

Here's a simple test you can apply to every new public works project, building plan or government land purchase: Will it increase the region's total greenhouse-gas emissions, or reduce them? That test is courtesy of King County, Washington's Executive Ron Sims, but state, regional, and city governments across the country are taking action to make sure development doesn't undermine their energy and emissions goals.

The Playbook for Green Buildings and Neighborhoods: Strategic Local Climate Solutions, a web-based resource, provides strategies, tips, and tools that counties can use to take immediate action on climate change through: green building, green neighborhoods, and sustainable infrastructure. The Playbook is designed both for communities that are considering making the first steps toward these, as well as for those who want to take existing efforts to a new level.

"An ever-expanding footprint of our urban areas is not sustainable," says John Gormley, Ireland's Minister for the Environment, Heritage and Local Government. That department has just released a new set of planning guidelines for sustainable residential development in urban areas.

The US's first suburb, Levittown, is launching a program to encourage energy efficiency upgrades in its homes. Volunteers are going door-to-door to publicize house upgrades that could improve the community's carbon footprint by 20%. But "having a green neighborhood and a green home are two different things" --although greening the houses is a step forward, the suburban form creates much greater impacts by requiring car use.

Land use and transportation planning are keys to making cities more resilient in the face of energy and climate uncertainty. But what might climate- and energy-smart communities look like, and what tools are available to help plan them? This article from New Urban News describes a technique for planning walkable neighborhoods, developed by Criterion Planners of Portland, Oregon and the US Natural Resources Defense Council. "My intent is to put the methodology in the public domain," says Eliot Allen of Criterion. "Climate change is too important to be proprietary."

The major challenge facing this and the next generation of architects, planners and builders is how to develop land use patterns that respond to the demands of the post-carbon age and provide a high quality of life for future generations. How our profession adapts to the need for reducing dependency on fossil fuels and contributes to the use of new technologies and approaches to planning and development that foster sustainability is critically important and will be the focus of this year’s Salzburg Congress on Urban Planning and Development.

A paper released by the California Chapter of the American Planning Association that recommends basic and important policy principles to guide planning-related actions needed to effectively respond to greenhouse gas emission and climate change challenges. The principles are organized by level of government: State, regional, and local.

City and county governments have the ability and opportunity to help California achieve its emissions reduction goals because they are the agencies responsible for creating local community land planning policy. Many cities and counties in Northern California have already done so with impressive results, and even more are following their lead.

Alex Steffen of WorldChanging on why developing low-emissions vehicles is nowhere near as important as developing more compact, efficient and livable cities. Focus on new automotive technologies can distract us from the much more effective strategy of building in less-consumptive ways.