Utilizing land-use indicators for local government adaptation: Tainan City as a case study

Abstract

Land-use planning plays a key role in mitigation of and adaptation to climate change. Many strategies for adaptation to climate change are associated with land-use planning, including the use of smart transportation to reduce emissions and coastal buffer zones to enable communities to adapt to rising sea levels. Local governments tend to integrate certain adaptation strategies into their land-use planning by engaging public and private city departments to address aspects such as health and safety. In recent years, many researchers and planners have established a link between climate change adaptation and sustainability development. They have also developed an effective sustainability indicator system for spatial planning. In this study, Tainan City was used as a case study to develop land-use adaptation indicators in response to climate events through the integration of climate change adaptation policies, spatial planning approaches, and local sustainability indicators to establish a structure for developing an indicator program. The main purpose of this indicator system was to monitor the long-term effects of climate and land-use changes in Tainan City and determine the effectiveness of certain adaptation policies through indicators. These land-use indicators are suitable for exploring the risks of and adaptive capacity in response to climate events. Taken together, the findings of this study underscore the importance of using land indicators in exploring the current and future effects of climate change, adaptive action, and land use.