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.