Our Chief Exec Sue Pritchard gives a talk on the 'Practical considerations for translating land use decisions into delivery - coordination, managing constraints and implications for infrastructure, development and land management'.

"Land is multifunctional, it's not single use. The same hectare can already grow food, hold water, store carbon, give people places to sit and walk. The failures tend to come about when we try to optimise for one metric and we call it progress. The seduction of that single silver bullet metric. Housing targets might be met, but flood risks are left in the two hard box and banked for later. Energy might be delivered, but the best farmland on which we're going to be able to grow crops in a climate-challenged future is gone. These are trade-offs. They're not calculations. Models can't adjudicate between food security and food storage and 1.5 million homes. Those are value judgements about what a place is for. The people who live with the decisions have to have a hand in shaping them, not consulted later, but be in the room. Those who are affected must be involved. So it's the place where all of this becomes real."