Conservation values, conservation-planning and climate change.

Abstract

The desire to reduce carbon emissions and the desire to sustain historic buildings and environments are two significant con temporary policy objectives which potentially are not easy to reconcile. It is through local governance and policy systems that much of the mediation between these will take place and, in the UK, through the conservation-planning system. This paper focuses first upon the relation between conservation values and the powerful agenda of carbon-reduction and the way that decision-making is mediated through systems of regulation, such as planning control, through a number of brief case studies. The paper then goes on to argue the need to explore how these two forces might positively interact in new ways through the case study of proposed works to Hexham Abbey in northern England.