Confronting the effects of climate change through development plans

Abstract

In recent years, climate change as a consequence of global warming, has garnered significant attention. Therefore, serious measures must be considered in the development planning process to adapt to and reduce effects of climate change. This research evaluates six development plans in Isfahan, Iran in the face of climate change effects using a framework consisting of three components of the analytical Awareness-Analysis-Action (A-A-A) approach and using quantitative and qualitative content analysis methods. In fact, the evaluation of the level of attention of the development plans from the perspective of the level of reflection and attention to raising awareness about the issues of climate change, the ability to analyze the available climate information in a useful way to support planning decisions and the level of special actions to deal with these changes. Finally, out of the three elements of the approach, the highest amount of attention in the plans is related to the element of action with 67/70% and the lowest is related to the element of awareness with 39/10%. The overall evaluation of the development plans shows that their role in integrating climate change issues into urban planning in Iran is still limited and insufficient. On the other hand, air pollution and climate change are closely related, as chemicals that cause air quality deterioration often enter together with greenhouse gases. Therefore, it can be said that although indicators of the transportation dimension (A3-J) with 80.66%, resource management have been given special attention under the action component, but carbon sequestration dimension (A2-F) with 14.63%, under the analysis component that seeks to evaluate the amount of air pollutants, classification of the type and sources of emission of pollutants could not reflect more than half of the total percentage in all development plans.