Nigel Keith Downes

Building Resilience to Climate Change Through Adaptive Land Use Planning in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

This paper describes the adaption needs of Ho Chi Minh City and its efforts to develop and incorporate adaptation principles into its urban decision-making and planning processes. We outline an approach that is envisioned to lead to an increase in the city’s resilience to climate-related physical and social vulnerabilities. This paper describes the objectives of an integrated adaptation planning framework for the city, which is intended to advance and disseminate knowledge, inform decision makers and the general public about climate change risks, and increase their capacity to implement necessary adaptation measures while strengthening the general response capacity of the urban system.

Understanding Ho Chi Minh City’s Urban Structures for Urban Land-Use Monitoring and Risk-Adapted Land-Use Planning

This chapter outlines an urban structure type approach used to portray, classify and understand the settlement patterns and urban structures of the current and emerging landscapes of Ho Chi Minh City. An important prerequisite for establishing much needed efficient and proactive, as well as rapid, adaptation planning strategies is the spatial and rational characterisation of the current urban fabric according to vulnerability relevant features. In our work an understanding of urban settlement patterns and urban structures allowed for the capturing of the highly dynamic spatiotemporal social and structural changes associated with rapid urbanisation processes. The aim was an integrated assessment of the underlying the inherent urban resilience based on coherent and credible indicator sets. The approach provides a common spatial framework at the resolution of the urban block for data integration various thematic and scientific disciplines at the same spatial scale. The scale provides a clear instrument to generate portfolios of block-specific core indicators, move across scales, run scenarios and aggregate to larger planning horizons, ultimately useful to determine hotspots for administrative interventions and to assist prioritising in spatial planning decision-making.

Current Constraints and Future Directions for Risk Adapted Land-Use Planning Practices in the High-Density Asian Setting of Ho Chi Minh City

The need to integrate adaptation efforts into land-use planning policies has been only recently recognized in Ho Chi Minh City. The citys latest planning guidance addresses both flooding resilience and mitigation of urban heat. This paper outlines the development contexts and the current barriers for adapted land-use planning within the city. The key challenge for land-use planning is communicating the important functions and services of open and natural urban spaces and effectively guiding the mainly individual developer-driven development. As the realization of non-structural adaptation measures is in strong contrast to the current market-driven private and short-term developer interests, the main development trajectories are questioned and synergies identified.

Urban Environment: An Overview of Results

This chapter provides a brief introduction into the thematic research results of the action field “Urban Environment” of the project. The developed framework provides support to incorporate the essential steps of integrated adaptation planning, which include the spatially explicit mapping of risks and recommended planning measures for risk reduction. Urban adaptation policies are often seen to interact with other policy goals, leading to an assortment of trade-offs and implementation constraints. Using an integrated planning approach, trade-offs and synergies were be explicitly mapped, going beyond the simple qualitative statements that have been used in many urban climate adaptation studies to date. The chapters of part “Urban Environment” present the results of the detailed analysis of three core urban adaptation policies, urban flood-risk management (Thinh et al. 2016, this volume), urban storm-water management (Rujner and Goedecke 2016, this volume) and urban heat-island mitigation (Katzschner et al. 2016, this volume), while the energy consumption of the transport sector is analysed as one important urban mitigation policy (Emberger 2016, this volume). These individual chapters are contextualised and framed by an introduction of the integrative planning framework for adapted land-use planning (Storch et al. 2016, this volume), recommendation for the administrative integration (Goedecke and Welsch 2016, this volume) and the explanation of the developed spatial information basis developed from an urban structure type approach (Downes et al. 2016, this volume).

Adaptation: Integrative Planning Framework for Adapted Land-Use Planning

The adaptation of mega-urban regions and their landscapes to climate change is predominantly a spatial planning matter. Rapidly developing Asian megacities, like Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) in Vietnam, need to become more resilient and less vulnerable to climate change. Our contribution takes spatial planning as the starting point. It highlights opportunities and challenges for spatially-explicit adaptation strategies in HCMC and shows how adaptation to climate change can be used to influence land-use planning and future urban development. Special attention is given to urban water management issues. Here the focus lies on risk management and non-structural protection measures to lessen climate-related urban risks. For rapidly developing mega-urban regions the need for focused support and guidance in formulating and embedding suitable adaptation policies and spatially explicit zoning regulations is apparent. Within its multi-stakeholder environment borne out of conflicting interests, land use planning requires more than ever science-based information to formulate spatially explicit and integrated urban climate adaptation policies.

Strategic Land-Use Planning in a Changing Climate—Adapting to the Spatial Dynamics of Risk in Ho Chi Minh City

For Asian cities situated within mega-urban coastal regions, such as Ho Chi Minh City, there is a pressing need for adaptation to climate change to focus on minimising exposure and reducing vulnerability by increasing urban resilience to the future impacts of climate extremes. Scientifically predicted are the direct impacts of climate change on populations (i.e. by urban flooding) and the indirect effects through impacts on climate-sensitive urban sectors (i.e. housing, energy supply systems). Geographic context gives rise to the biophysical exposure, which includes factors such as topography, connectivity and urban structures, all of which can be mediated by spatial planning or construction technologies. Further the urban fabric underlies the patterns of social vulnerability, including issues such as population density, levels of income and education as well as institutional capacities. Here spatial planning measures to enhance adaptive capacity should be directed towards decreasing biophysical exposures and the social vulnerability from the viewpoint of place-based risk assessments. Key urban impact and vulnerability indicators vary considerably from settlement to settlement and even within settlements. The location, the built urban structures, the dominant building types, the social-economic characteristics and institutional capacities are all highly dynamic factors with an important spatio-temporal dimension that affects ultimately the overall exposure, vulnerability and environmental performance of a settlement. Rapid urbanisation driven by fast changes in socioeconomic development conditions are the key factors influencing the future levels in both exposure and vulnerability to climate extremes. Our impact assessment study highlights, that the influence of non-climatic stressors—like urbanisation as the spatial manifestation of socio-economic processes is still widely under acknowledged. Traditionally only snapshots of the current urban situations have been partially integrated into risk assessments, resulting often, for highly dynamic urban regions, in an overestimation of climate extremes as a stressor of risk. An urgent need has arisen to readdress and improve the scientific methods and datasets to examine these key non-climatic drivers of future urban risk and to assess their relative importance for risk propagation compared to primary changes in climate. The most significant issue here is the integration of the future dynamics of urban development processes.