Climate change adaptation through urban planning. A proposed approach for 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 our understanding of the spatial dimensions of climate change vulnerability and how to incorporate them into planning practices. Firstly, attention has been mostly focused on how to adjust physical assets to climate change, while the question of how to strengthen local adaptive capacity remains rather neglected. Secondly, while many cities have institutionalized climate change, integration of adaptation considerations into existing urban planning and governance systems is still lacking. As a result, not only do the plans and programs in place for urban development and environmental management often fail to address adaptation needs, they may even jeopardize current adaptive capacity. The latter has particularly serious consequences for Sub-Saharan cities, where people's capacity for autonomous adaptation is a crucial resource, given the limited capacity of local government institutions to fulfill their responsibilities. This chapter proposes a methodology for main-streaming adaptation into existing planning documents, developed specifically for the city of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. After providing a brief review of approaches and challenges in adaptation mainstreaming, the main features of the proposed methodology and preliminary results of its application are presented. Lessons learned from the experience are examined in the conclusions.