Development plans, as strategic documents that guide investment and organize the spatial structure of a city, must be sensitive and responsive to the increasing risks posed by climate change. However, it remains unclear which explicit and implicit policies these plans propose to address climate issues and how these policies align within the dual frameworks of “adaptation” and “mitigation, the primary strategies for combating climate change. Thus, a comprehensive study is required to identify these policies as key climate themes, to map the network of relationships among them, and to assess the extent to which development plans incorporate each of the proposed approaches for addressing climate change in the local development plans. This research aims to clarify how both implicit and explicit key climate themes are reflected in local development plans in response to climate change. This study used an integrative approach, employing a “reflexive-network” analysis of themes to examine the content of the data. Seven recent development plans from the Isfahan metropolitan city were analyzed as a case study. The results indicate that adaptation policies to climate change are more prominently emphasized than emission reduction and source control policies. However, the plans show insufficient internal coherence and continuity. The results indicate that the marginalization of climate change is primarily due to insufficient climate awareness, weak climate planning, and institutional fragmentation. Therefore, three policy areas are proposed: reforming economic priorities, enhancing climate planning and literacy, and promoting institutional integration.
Dadashpoor et al. (Wed,) studied this question.