Past the hype. Climate change as a structural spatial planning problem

Adaptation to climate change is not only a physical or spatial issue, but also a social and political-administrative issue. This advice especially focuses on the following aspects: How is the problem tackled from an administrative viewpoint. Which issues receive sufficient focus and which parts of the problem remain underexposed? How is the tuning among and within managing bodies? Who feels responsible? How is society involved in the issue? The central question is how the Dutch government can best anticipate the spatial consequences of climate change. Chapter 2 provides a short overview of certainties and uncertainties of the climate system and the spatial consequences of climate change for the Netherlands. The societal perception of the climate change problem is described in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 addresses administrative aspects. The recommendations of the VROM council (the Netherlands Council of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment) are provided in Chapter 5, in which the elements of a spatial strategy are discussed. The VROM council started this advice trajectory with an extensive literature analysis of the climate system and current knowledge of climate change. Next the implementation of this knowledge in policy is examined. In that process, the authors were confronted with a number of fallacies (thinking errors) that could hamper a sensible approach to climate change. (mk)