Climate Change Mitigation, Adaptation and Sustainable Urban Development: A Case Study of Copenhagen and Portland

Driscoll, Patrick Arthur

10. term

Master in Urban Planning & Management

2010

2010-06-08

161 pages

Urban planning strategies for climate change are moving beyond mitigation and beginning to encompass adaptation as well. As adaptation concerns move higher up the policy agenda, planners and policy makers will be faced with difficult choices about how to effectively craft responses that take into account a wide range of societal concerns spanning the spectrum of sustainable development, including issues relating to intra- and intergenerational equity, environmental health and economic stability (Adger W. N., 2009). Moreover, it is becoming increasingly clear that climate change is intimately bound up with development paths (IPCC, 2007; Sathaye, et al., 2007), implying that the traditional focus on energy and environmental planning may be misplaced. Planning literature has only recently begun to attend to these issues (Howard, 2009) and there are a number of potential synergies, conflicts and trade-offs that will have to be made between mitigation, adaptation and development goals, sustainable or otherwise. The following study is an exploratory, comparative case study of Copenhagen Metropolitan region, and Portland, Oregon, Metropolitan region that was conducted with the intention of mapping out and describing the main intersecting and diverging lines between: 1) climate mitigation and adaptation goals and 2) climate goals and other urban and socio-economic development goals. The main findings suggest that planners in the main treat mitigation and adaptation as distinct policy issues and while there is some evidence that cities attempt to link climate change strategies to other, pre-existing planning goals for denser, more sustainable development and mobility patterns, there are still substantial policy conflicts left unresolved.

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