Rough assessment of the consideration of spatial planning tools in the municipal plans for adaptation to climate change. An example of selected Polish cities

Abstract

 The subject of the study whose results are presented in this paper is an attempt at assessing the consideration of spatial planning tools in the municipal plans for adaptation to climate change, performed on the sample of fifteen Polish cities with populations of over 100,000. The assessment was performed using a three-step descriptive analysis. The first stage consisted of identifying the thematic areas of such adaptation for which spatial planning tools had been used. The second stage, done against the background of a general review of spatial planning tools, involved identifying the tools that could be assigned to the already identified thematic areas of urban adaptation to climate change. The number of tools used was totalled at the third and final stage, and synthetic analysis of the tools used was performed using a set of selected criteria.The study is the first, basic attempt to empirically verify the hypothesis that spatial planning and spatial policy play a critical role in adapting cities to climate change, as stated in the subject literature.