Climate Proofing Spatial Planning Policies in Austria – Case Studies and Findings

The Austrian Panel on Climate Change (APCC, 2014), as well as the next report version (2021) emphasise that spatial planning policies have to be empowered to combat climate change. While the 2014 version contained a rather modest presentation of spatial planning and mobility approaches, the future version will have a full chapter on “spatial planning and climate change”. Usually, APCC reports tend to trust sources that are highly validated and highly agreed upon by many experts. “Climate proofing” should be a process to measure the mitigation and adaptation impact of spatial strategies and programmes, but so far there is only poor evidence that this exists: we believe that spatial planning is powerful, but it is hard to prove this in qualitative and/or quantitative terms and numbers