Climate change is one of the major environmental issues for the coming years, both regionally and globally. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) writes that most of the global warming in the past 50 years is caused by human activities. The Netherlands are expected to face climate change impacts on, amongst others, land and water use and therefore on spatial planning.
At stake is to look for opportunities for an emission low (re)development of our spatial infrastructure, to enhance land-use opportunities with respect to sources and sinks of greenhouse gases, to increase adaptive capacity in the management of, amongst others, agriculture, natural resources and water, and to enhance the protection of our infrastructure and thus the safety of our people.
Although the co-dependency of spatial planning and climate change has largely been accepted, spatial planners and the climate change community have had mostly isolated (research) agendas so far. A major goal of the programme "Climate changes Spatial Planning" is to enhance joint-learning between those to communities and people in practice within spatial planning. The programme aims to generate internationally competitive scientific results and to provide a knowledge base that interactively supports practitioners on how to cope with climate change.The mission of the programme is to introduce climate change and climate variability as one of the guiding principles for spatial planning in the Netherlands. The programme recognises that the benefits of climate research arise from the application of its findings in land-, water and nature management.
Objectives
The main objectives are:
To offer the Dutch government, the private sector and other stakeholders a clustered, high-quality and accessible knowledge infrastructure on the interface of climate change and spatial planning.
To engage a dialogue between stakeholders and scientists in order to support the development of spatially explicit adaptation and mitigation strategies that anticipate for climate change and contribute to a safe, sustainable and resilient socio-economic infrastructure in the Netherlands.
Examples of addressed scientific objectives:
Increased insight in cloud and aerosol interactions
High quality climate scenarios, suitable for use in various impact assessment applications
New multi-gas approaches to assess GHG emissions on ecosystems level
A Prototype of a multi-platform monitoring system for land use bound GHG emissions.
Development of spatial decision support systems for cross-sectoral adaptation strategies
Innovation of methodologies to assess Costs and (ancillary) benefits for adaptation and mitigation.
