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The role of regional plans in addressing climate change
Regional-scale planning and governance is often interpreted as the appropriate scale at which to address the multitude of concerns facing metropolitan areas. As regions are often considered more flexible in crafting their policies, regional plans have increasingly been called on to address a broader set of goals, including coordinating climate change strategies. In Germany, regions operate within a highly institutionalized setting, including reciprocal relationships between the federal government, states (Länder), and municipalities. This produces both temporal and geographical variability in the extent, effectiveness, and timing of regional attempts to address climate change.
While regional plans themselves are excellent first-hand resources for understanding such temporal and spatial disparities, reading and evaluating regional plans requires excessive time and expertise. This research utilizes Natural Language Processing techniques to qualitatively analyze regional plans. In cooperation with the Federal Institute for Research on Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development (BBSR), we collected 222 spatial plans from 1998 to 2023, for 110 German planning regions and applied topic modeling and a large language model to extract and evaluate the climate mitigation and adaptation strategies.
In collaboration with the Federal Institute for Research on Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development (BBSR).
