Urban environmental planning strategies for the adaptation of Ho Chi Minh City to climate change

Abstract

Climate change is altering the traditional context of urban land-use planning and is shaping the priorities of sustainability. The environmental dimension of spatial planning in emerging megacities, such as Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), has become a strong rationale for coordinating spatially well defined adaptation actions and responses and integrating mitigation policies. While urban development trends in HCMC address both mitigation needs and the rationale of adaptation to the effects of climate change, the main focus of combating climate change impacts in the mega-urban region of HCMC has to be the practical implementation of adaptation measures. Planned adaptation implies spatial planning decisions and measures at the urban-scale that facilitate the reduction of the adverse impacts of climate change. Beyond this, however, adaptation has the potential to realise new opportunities for urban development planning, scoping planning issues and opportunities at different spatial scales. For HCMC it creates the necessity to take climate change responses into consideration in spatial planning practices, leading to changes in the traditional administrative structures to which spatial planning is accustomed. Since many of the main impacts of climate change exhibit a land-use dimension, a downscaled and spatially explicit urban environmental planning information system can function as a switchboard for mitigation, adaptation and sustainable development objectives. The proposed sharing of a commonly accepted spatial information base can engage dialogue between stakeholders and scientists in order to support the development of spatially explicit planning strategies that anticipate the climate change risks at the mega-urban scale and contribute to resilient settlement structures for HCMC.