Incorporating Resilience and Adaptive Strategies to Climate Change in Urban and Territorial Planning in Uruguay

Abstract

Although Uruguay undertakes many actions at the national level to tackle extreme phenomena in climate change, such as the creation of the National Plan on Climate Change, most of the attention was given to the Energy Reconversion Plan, or agriculture insurance facilities for Climate Change Disaster. In a local urban context, however, extreme climate events, mainly floods and droughts, have had less attention but concrete adverse effects on many urban areas, particularly on the most vulnerable communities (population and infrastructure) and on climate-dependent basic services and economic activities. This chapter describes the current policies and initiatives taken regarding climate change at an urban level. We can identify the birth of a new institutional framework, which is creating a methodology to create a dialogue with the main changes in Territorial and Urban Planning at an international level. The chapter also focuses on the main case studies in the capital city, Montevideo, in particular the Urban Plans for Streams and Basins, which dialogue with Local Plans for urban renewal, including climate change issues. In addition to this, a focus on the Metropolitan Plan on Climate Change shows how from a methodological point of view an innovative participatory methodology has been developed considering the necessary actor’s network to be established toward the implementation of the adaptation measures. Finally, some important considerations are made, thinking critically about how to include all the new strategies to deal with climate change, resilience, and sustainable development from a long-term perspective on a multi-level scale, national, metropolitan, and local.