Climate Change Adaptation in Urban Land Use Planning. On the integration status of climate adaptation-relevant measures in land-use plans and local development plans of medium-sized cities in Germany

Abstract

Cities and municipalities play a key role in the successful im-plementation of climate adaptation efforts, but it is unclear to what extent municipal planning instruments exploit their existing potentials. The research subject of the present article is therefore the current status of the integration of climate adaptation measures into urban land-use planning. Land-use plans and local development plans of ten medium-sized German cities are analysed for 24 different adaptation measures from six different fields of action. In addition, both levels of urban land-use planning were analysed for coherence in terms of content. The study is based on a qualitative structuring content analysis of in total 81 planning documents, using a cate-gory-based coding guide, with a subsequent quantitative evaluation of the results. The results show an untapped potential on both planning levels. Currently, the greatest success can be seen by various low-regret measures related to urban green.