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European spatial planners deal with two major concerns: adaptation to climate changes (ACC) and the design and management of green infrastructures (GIs). ACC calls for the renewal of spatial planning with constant appeals to the need to adequately prepare for extreme climate events. GIs deliver ecosystem services (ES), which consist of beneficial functions to living beings in terms of, for example, helping people adapt to climate change. An effective implementation of adaptation measures at the regional and sub-regional scale is based on an efficient and prompt spatial planning system and GIs management. In this paper, we aim at comparing the attitudes of Italian and Polish spatial planning systems with respect to the integration of concepts related to ACC and GIs. We describe commonalities and differences between the two spatial planning frameworks by scrutinizing regional plans adopted in Sardinia (Italy) and Wielkopolska (Poland). We found out a scarce consideration of both ACC and GIs planning and management. The findings suggest that the regional spatial planning tools need to be updated to be fully satisfactory in terms of ACC and GIs concepts.

Extensive urbanization is a major cause of landscape fragmentation, depletes natural habitats and affects climate change. An efficient counteraction is offered by the realization of green infrastru...

Climate change is a concerning phenomenon worldwide. The reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is the core of the mitigation strategies that are effective countermeasures to address a changing climate in the long term. Nevertheless, the need for short-term solutions regarding adaptation to climate change (ACC) has gained growing interest in the scientific community and in European institutions. European and national ACC principles are being integrated in strategies and plans. In Italy, some regions have adopted ACC principles in strategic plans, which influence the whole local planning system and persuade local communities to become more climate-resilient. This study focuses on the mainstreaming of ACC into strategies, plans, programs, and projects (SPPPs) adopted by the following Italian cities: Bologna, Milan, Naples, Rome, Turin, and Venice. We scrutinize the contents of SPPPs with respect to four criteria: (i) references to strategies or plans for ACC; (ii) inclusion of ACC objectives and (iii) measures; and (iv) references to—or the inclusion of—climatic analysis on historical series and/or future projections. We found out that most SPPPs adopted by the cities have considered ACC in a promising way, i.e., all the cities are inclined to promote ACC, despite three of them lacking a municipal ACC strategy or plan and a National Adaptation Plan not being in force.

Composite indicators (CIs), i.e., combinations of many indicators in a unique synthetizing measure, are useful for disentangling multisector phenomena. Prominent questions concern indicators’ weighting, which implies time-consuming activities and should be properly justified. Landscape fragmentation (LF), the subdivision of habitats in smaller and more isolated patches, has been studied through the composite index of landscape fragmentation (CILF). It was originally proposed by us as an unweighted combination of three LF indicators for the study of the phenomenon in Sardinia, Italy. In this paper, we aim at presenting a weighted release of the CILF and at developing the Hamletian question of whether weighting is worthwhile or not. We focus on the sensitivity of the composite to different algorithms combining three weighting patterns (equalization, extraction by principal component analysis, and expert judgment) and three indicators aggregation rules (weighted average mean, weighted geometric mean, and weighted generalized geometric mean). The exercise provides the reader with meaningful results. Higher sensitivity values signal that the effort of weighting leads to more informative composites. Otherwise, high robustness does not mean that weighting was not worthwhile. Weighting per se can be beneficial for more acceptable and viable decisional processes.

Adaptation to climate change means adjustment of human and natural systems to climatic actual or expected events, in order to minimize damage or maximize benefit. Adaptation implies involvement, coordination, and cooperation of different actors and sectors. Multi-actor collaboration usually characterizes the drafting of regional plans, which act as bridges between national and local administrative levels. Regional administrations address resilience issues, through spatial planning processes. This study focuses on the regional plans adopted by the Autonomous Region of Sardinia (Italy), south European Mediterranean region, an area that will be negatively affected by climate change in the coming decades. We aim at proposing a method for scrutinizing regional plans related to spatial planning issues, by using criteria rooted in the scientific literature and adaptation strategies. We found out that (i) the scientific literature did not sufficiently address the role of regional plans in the context of adaptation to climate change and (ii) the method proposed and applied in this study highlights whether some key adaptation issues are included in the plans, and might make aware planners and policy makers of basic information concerning the interplay ‘regional planning vs. adaptation to climate change’.