Possible impact of climate change.

Adaptation of land-use management and development strategies to climate change is given growing attention. Awareness and mobilisation over recent years has been growing regarding the problems of natural disasters and the measures of local actors.

Climatic change will have considerable consequences on the regional level with respect to land-use, disaster management and economic activities. Within the next decades demographic changes, urbanisation processes, and the consequences of climate change will have significant influence on the challenges of regional planning and development. Increasing land consumption, and higher population densities with the associated infrastructure needs and water and food demand on the one hand, and the tendency to extreme hydrological events, and soil degradation lead to growing conflict potentials.

This course is to be seen as a contribution to the environmental capacity building for the development of land-use management strategies in the light of climate change. Integrated approaches to environmental governance and resources management are required.