Mainstreaming Adaptation to Climate Change Into Urban Planning: Lessons From Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

The need for climate change adaptation is increasingly influencing the discourse about spatial development strategies throughout the world. Nevertheless, several gaps still exist in understanding the spatial dimension of vulnerability to climate change induced impacts and in incorporating it into planning practices. Firstly, most of the attention has been focused on how to adjust physical assets to climate change, while the question of how to strengthen local adaptive capacity remains rather neglected. Secondly, even if many cities have institutionalized climate change within their functions, integration of adaptation considerations into existing urban planning and governance systems is still lacking or immature. As a result, existing regulatory tools and plans often fail to address adaptation needs and, even, may end up jeopardizing current adaptive capacity. The paper takes on the task to filling in these gaps by proposing a methodology for mainstreaming adaptation into existing plan