Planning for Climate Change, Why does it Matter? (From Phenomenon to Integrative Action Plan)

Abstract

Climate change was appeared as a phenomenon since the early 19th Century, and since then non serious international commitment was conducted to reduce its rapid impacts, however after 1980th many countries made extreme efforts to document and understand climate change complex impacts and how to deal with it, but those efforts marked by successes and failures within a very uneven pace. Nowadays many (developed) countries adopted the idea of planning the city for climate change (In-spite of inherent limitations to predictive capacity and uncertainty) that guarantee providing the city not only with the necessary Actions and precautions that insure the city resiliency and inhabitants’ safety, but also contribute to quality of life to have liveable cities.However, many of developing countries have another point of view in considering this issue, as they don’t take climate change issue into consideration while planning for its local/national development Agenda, despite most of them are expose to natural disasters/Hazards (such as tsunamis, floods, flash floods or excessive increase in temperature), depending on the Reaction strategy and short-term Adaptation plans to confront such disasters or at least minimize their impacts. As they believe that even if they accept to conduct climate change action plan; it may represent extreme financial burden on its Local/National budget or it may affect the NGOs/international fund for development.This paper aims to reveal this conflict by explain the climate change paradigm and how/why it transformed from just a phenomenon to Action plan. Followed by identifying the climate change planning cycle and how to make climate change action plan and the challenges that the developing countries faces in planning for climate change and how we could support their initiatives.