Strategic Environmental Assessment as a tool to embed climate change adaptation in urban planning. The case of four Italian cities

Adaptation to climate change and the need to deal with its impacts pose in evi-dence how important it is to identify and implement new planning practices that integrate these profiles into land-use policy-making. Within this conceptual framework, the identification of a system of plan objectives and actions that char-acterize the integration of climate change adaptation into planning policies, with particular reference to the local scale, is of particular importance. In this study, a methodology for implementing this integration is proposed through the estab-lishment of a logical framework for the construction of municipal masterplans through strategic environmental assessment, as a pathway in which plans are formed and developed, as part of the assessment process, through the identifica-tion of a strategic system of objectives and an operational system of planning ac-tions based on the integration of climate change adaptation into the plan formation process.