Topic: A Path Towards Sustainability and Biodiversity in Metropolitan Los Angeles

Presenters: Mark VanderSchaaf

Mark VanderSchaaf had a thirty-year career as an urban and regional planner in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul Metropolitan Area where he ultimately served as the regional planning director for that area’s seven-county Metropolitan Council from 2004 to 2016. In that role Mark also became a national leader in the field of public sector sustainability planning, serving as the chair and immediate past chair for the Regional and Intergovernmental Planning Division of the American Planning Association (APA) upon retirement. More recently Mark has focused on sustainability planning issues in Metropolitan Los Angeles, working pro bono with Pando Populus to help address sustainability priorities of the Chief Sustainability Officers Task Force of Los Angeles County, and APA. That work culminated in April, 2024 with the publication of a free e-book, Sustainability Planning in Metropolitan Los Angeles: Products and Processes. In future years he will be focusing his work on biodiversity issues as a new appointee of the Biodiversity Expert Council of the City of Los Angeles.

Mark’s Cobb and Friends talk on May 28 will introduce national perspectives on urban and regional sustainability planning, and how such planning is occurring throughout Metropolitan Los Angeles. It will especially consider how varying law and policy frameworks in the United States make it challenging to ensure that sustainability strategies in this country are well aligned with one another. He will emphasize similarities and differences between sustainability planning in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul Area and Metropolitan Los Angeles as examples of such challenges. He will talk about how planning products and processes in Metropolitan Los Angeles may well serve as helpful models for the rest of the United States. Finally, he will consider how and why biodiversity planning is poised to become a key focus of sustainability efforts in the future, and how the City of Los Angeles’ biodiversity index is poised to engender a “best practice” strategy for biodiversity protection and enhancement as the impacts of climate change become increasingly severe. L.A.’s biodiversity work will have consequences not only regionally and nationally, but throughout the world.

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