Klimawandel und Raumentwicklung: Anpassungsstrategien der Stadt- und Regionalplanung in Stadtregionen der Küstenzone am Beispiel des Ostseeraumes.Schlussbericht plan B:altic.

Climate change impacts are expected for the urban regions of the Baltic Sea coast through rising temperature, sea-level rise and an increased intensity as well as frequency in extreme weather events. Climate change scenarios are accompanied with uncertainties, and the specific local consequences are difficult to predict. Therefore, striving for a sustainable regional and urban development, it is no longer sufficient to consider only the necessary mitigation measures of climate change, but it becomes also essential to develop comprehensive adaptation strategies. A challenge is to prepare for change and uncertainty in complex social-ecological settings and to become resilient towards unforeseen future impacts of climate change. While as the urban regions of the Baltic Sea Coast experience pressures for spatial development, for instance due to their economic activities and functions. In this setting, multiple challenges to planning arise due to the specific characteristics of climate change and social-ecological complexities. Also planning has to answer how to plan future land use structures and how to develop adaptation strategies towards climate change impacts and further change processes. Land- use planning, in the form of regional and urban planning, provides a unique venue for integrated and anticipatory approaches and seems, therefore, suitable to adapt land-use to climate change. However, initiatives and measures taken by land-use planning are also causing risks and harms in interrelation with future and unforeseen climate change impacts. For example, this happen through increased land consumption, soil sealing or river regulation interplaying with heavy rain falls and leading to severe floods. To achieve a comprehensive analysis of climate change impacts, of their interplays with further ongoing change processes in urban regions and to avoid partial world-views, plan B:altic integrated different scientific disciplines with their respective perspectives and approaches. Due to the inherent focus on uncertainty, surprises and complexity, (social-ecological) resilience thinking was used as a bridging concept in the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research work as well as a guiding principle for the development of adaptation strategies to climate change. To this end, it was cooperated closely with an array of planning practitioners and stakeholders in some urban regions of the Baltic Sea coast. Next to the inter- and transdisciplinary integration methods such as common case studies and transdisciplinary scenarios, a wide array of quantitative as well as qualitative methods was applied by the social, natural as well as engineering scientist who formed the research group plan B:altic and who worked on disciplinary driven subprojects as well. Main results were that the main challenges for land-use planning are to tackle the uncertainty and the wide range of potential climate change impacts in the specific local context. Specific local social-ecological assets such as local climate, land-use with reference to ecosystem services as well as their interdependencies influence decisively the then specific local impacts of climate change. But this also bears the potential for specific local adaptation measures. But as climate change is not the priority topic in local and regional planning practice but instead it is seen in concurrence with other, short-term interests, planning practitioners perceive a low urgency to act upon climate change adaptation. Also given governance processes as well as structures (such as sectoral fragmentation) are barriers of climate change adaptation as well as of an all-encompassing social-ecological perspective on urban regions in practice. Structured processes of science-practice collaborations are seen as supportive for further adaptation, as the plan B:altic scenario planning process had shown. This process gave explicit inputs to a politically adopted adaptation strategy framework of the core city of the German partner. With reference to formal planning instruments at the urban and regional scale the analysis provided the basis to develop further conceptual developments of these instruments to facilitate the adaptive capacity of land-use planning However, these further conceptual developments do not seem to be sufficient in case of their implementation. It is considered as necessary to fundamentally change strategies within land-use planning. Within this context the opportunities but also restrictions of applying a transformative resilience perspective were shown.