The use of climate knowledge in urban planning

It is a well established fact that the urban landscape creates a climate which influences, for example, human comfort, air quality and energy consumption. However, in spite of this knowledge, it has been recognised that climate issues often have low impact on the urban planning process in practice. The reason for this lack of influence is an important question for which answers must be sought among climatologists, planners and the planning process. The main objective with the present study was to investigate if, how and when knowledge about the climate is used in the urban planning process. The research strategy was developed in an interdisciplinary research group involving climatologists and planners. Case studies involving different interview techniques and historical data were carried out by different actors involved in urban planning at the municipality level in three cities in Sweden. The study showed that urban planners were interested in climatic aspects but the use of climatic information was unsystematic and the results confirmed that climatology has a low impact on the planning process. The low impact is a result of several constraints which could be related to five explanatory variables i.e. conceptual and knowledge based, technical, policy, organisational and the market. The discussion part of the paper presents some key conclusions which address these constraints. It is important that urban climatologists meet the planners demand-driven needs by providing them with good arguments, suitable methods and tools. Urban climatologists are also encouraged to improve the awareness of the importance of urban climate not only among planners but also among decision-makers and the public. However, as planning is a political activity which not always is based on or even related to scientific knowledge, some of the identified constraints could only be counteracted through improved institutional capacity in the social context of planning.