An Integrated Framework for Incorporating Climate Risk into Urban Land-Use Change Modeling

Abstract

Cities are complex socio-technical systems (STSs) under tremendous stress due to climate change. To incorporate resilience into urban plans and move towards evidence-based long-term decision-making, we must unravel complex land-use dynamics and the effect of climate uncertainties on cities. Currently, land-use dynamics are explored through Cellular Automata models to investigate the impacts of urban planning scenarios. What is, however, missing to support resilience decisions, is a systematic analysis of long-term climate uncertainties on land-use change. This study addresses this gap by analysing the effects of flood uncertainties on land-use patterns. While conventionally, urban planning decisions for climate uncertainty are based on a few scenarios, we use exploratory modeling to sample and combine uncertain climate variables to scenarios and understand the implications of the climate scenarios on land use via computational experiments. Specifically, we integrate flood probability maps into land-use maps to assess land suitability. Agglomerative clustering allows us to analyze the resulting land-use maps based on their similarity. Finally, we select representative maps from each cluster and compare them with the baseline map. We apply our integrated modeling approach in the Metropolitan Region of Amsterdam (MRA). Our results show spatially explicit alternatives for high-density residential development that is climate-resilient. The proposed framework can be applied to other cities to investigate the long-term impacts of climate uncertainties and adopt resilience-informed decision-making.