Planning Support Systems (PSS) enable climate-informed planning. However, previous research confirms difficulties in the uptake of PSS due to their resource-intensive nature and lack of awareness of their usefulness. This chapter aims to make headway in understanding research priorities and gaps that need to be addressed for PSS to address climate resilience in the long run. To this end, we review the emerging body of knowledge in academia and practice by conducting a text-mining analysis of academic (n = 36,405) and non-academic (practice) (n = 86) literature on urban planning and climate resilience. We extract trends on climate pressures, infrastructure drivers, and planning responses. A key finding from the academic literature is that long-term planning continues to be limited to a few fixed scenarios and places a strong focus on single-sector strategies. Practice documents continue to be designed to inform high-level policies but not spatial plans that require integrated thinking. Our analysis concludes with a research agenda for improving PSS to (1) identify and integrate the full range of variables in the long term; (2) support the selection of appropriate planning responses across multiple infrastructure systems, and (3) improve flexibility in planning by a deeper understanding of temporal aspects such as planning timeframes.
This article used an open-source python repository for its analysis. It is well-suited for reproduction as more literature evolves on the intersection of urban planning and climate change. The adapted code is published alongside the article.
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