The Challenge of Spatial Information Management for Adaptation to Climate Change in Ho Chi Minh City

The environmental dimension of spatial planning in emerging Asian megacities such as Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) has become a strong rationale for coordinating spatially well defined adaptation actions and integrating mitigation policies. Climate change is changing the traditional context of urban development planning and is shaping the priorities of sustainability. While urban development trends in HCMC are addressing both mitigation needs and the rationale of adaptation to the effects of climate change, the main focus of combating climate change impacts in the megaurban region of HCMC has to be the practical implementation of adaptation measures. Planned adaptation implies policy decisions and measures at the urban-scale that facilitates the reduction of the adverse impacts of climate change. For HCMC it creates the necessity to take climate change responses into account in spatial planning practices. This will also lead to changes in the traditional administrative structures that spatial planning is accustomed to. Since many of the main impacts of climate change have a land-use or water-management dimension, a downscaled and spatially explicit urban environmental planning information system can function as a switchboard for mitigation, adaptation and sustainable development objectives. Currently there are large differences in the way knowledge is produced, the analytical approaches that are used and the designed urban and environmental planning strategies. The proposed sharing of a commonly accepted spatial information base can engage the dialogue between stakeholders and scientists in order to support the development of spatially explicit planning strategies that anticipate the climate change risks at the mega-urban scale and contribute to sustainable and resilient settlement structures for HCMC. 1. Spatially explicit Research on Adaptation to Climate Change In the emerging coastal mega-urban regions of Southeast Asia, climate change represents one of the greatest challenges. Recently climate change and its future impacts on Asian megacities in high-risk zones, such as the continent‘s main river delta regions, have emerged at the top of the international research agenda (Carew-Reid 2009). Since then, international policy agreements have been established to limit the emission of greenhouse gases. Nevertheless, even if a reduction in these emissions is achieved, the time lag in the climatic system will inevitably cause a substantial degree of climate change. The impacts of this change are, however, uneven with inter-tropical, densely populated delta regions exposed to rising sea levels (see Figure 1) among those expected to be hardest hit. Unlike mitigation, adaptation to climate change is more complex because adapting settlements to the negative impacts of climate change entirely depends not on its attributes to minimize energy consumption but, in contrast, on the geographical location of the existing settlement or planned urban development zone and area. 169 EnviroInfo 2010 (Cologne/Bonn) Integration of Environmental Information in Europe Copyright © Shaker Verlag 2010. ISBN: 978-3-8322-9458-8