Seite - 430 - in Biodiversity and Health in the Face of Climate Change

430 requirements of landscape plans, but can deviate from them if appropriate reasons are given in the planning process. Thus, there is a strong link between landscape and spatial planning (at the regional and federal state level) and land use planning (at the local level), even if landscape planning remains independent. Furthermore, all spa- tial and land use plans (and in some federal states, also landscape plans), are usually subject to a Strategic Environmental Assessment  (SEA) according to the EU SEA  Directive, by which potential impacts of plans on the environment and on human health are assessed. In the following text we concentrate on landscape plans at municipal level (aka ‘The local landscape plan’), as this is a sufficiently concrete level (scale usually 1:10.000), appropriate for considering health issues related to distinct areas; although health topics could also be an issue at other levels in the planning system. 19.3.2 The (Landscape) Planning System in  the  UK In the UK, planning is devolved to the four countries of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, whose enabling legislation and guidance tools are largely country-specific (Winter et  al. 2016). The English planning system, on which we put a certain focus here, differs strongly from the German one; with the ‘Localism Act’ of 2011 the regional planning tier was abolished and almost all planning responsibility was conferred to the local level. The only guidance for local planning is given by the ‘National Planning Policy Framework’ (NPPF, Department for Communities and Local Government 2012), which has to be “taken into account in the preparation of local and neighbourhood plans, and is a material consideration in planning decisions” (ibid., p.  1), the legislative basis of which are the ‘Planning & Compulsory Purchase Act’ (2004) and the ‘Town and Country Planning Regulations’ (2012). Local Plans have taken over the function of the former ‘Local Development Frameworks,’ which were a portfolio of different planning documents, with a ‘Core Strategy’ as their central element. Both kinds of local planning documents still co- exist and have to consider environmental and landscape issues, according to sec- tions 9 (‘Protecting Green Belt land’) and 11 (‘Conserving and Enhancing the Natural Environment’) of the NPPF.  Under the Town and Country Planning (Environmental Impact Assessment) Regulations 2017, local planning authorities have a general responsibility to consider the environmental implications of develop- ments that are subject to planning control. The 2017 Regulations integrate Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) procedures into this framework but apply only to those projects that are likely to have significant effects on the environment, e.g. airports, major road developments; power generation installations; mining, etc. Despite environmental issues only playing a subordinate role in the formal UK planning systems, no separate or independent landscape planning system exists. One could argue that this obvious neglect of environmental and landscape issues in UK land-use planning has led to attempts to fill that gap, for example, by a considerable amount of local and (sub-)regional level, informal planning instruments such as S. Heiland et al.