- Strategic environmental assessment for planning a low carbon city    710 kb by    Harashina, Sachihiko | sahara@depe.titech.ac.jp    Short Outline The paper examines the hybrid model of SEA in creating low carbon cities. This paper discusses the possibility of application of SEA in tackling climate change. Abstract Urban and regional planning has the key role to create low carbon cities. It is necessary to change the life style of people towards a sustainable way. But in many cities all over the world it has not been successful. Some European cities have been changing towards low carbon cities by creating ''eco cities'', but it is not prevailing. Most metropolises are to far from being sustainable cities. Especially, Tokyo has a big problem of sustainability caused by its spatial structure. The metropolitan area is the most sprawling and densely populated area on the globe. For energy efficiency of public transportation, it is good. But covered with too much build-up areas is a source of heat island phenomena. The use of electricity has been increasing in summer time for air conditioning, which is the major source of use of electricity today. Sustainability of Tokyo in total is not high. How can we resolve this problem? The answer is making a strategic plan of the spatial structure of the area. One answer might be so-called the multi urban core structure or eco-cities linkage. As we need strong leadership to change the spatial structure based on good social consensus, the plan must be made by good practice of public participation based on sufficient information disclosure. SEA should be a way to fulfill this requirement. The paper discusses the possibility of application of SEA to tackle to resolve the problem. A meeting based SEA applying the hybrid model will be examined as a way for this purpose. Keywords Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2009: Low Carbon Cities   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper