CLIMATE-RESILIENT LAND USE PLANNING AND ITS CONTRIBUTION TO LONG-TERM INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECT SUSTAINABILITY

Climate shocks increasingly undermine infrastructure performance across regions, exposing the limits of reactive adaptation and shifting attention toward preventive spatial decisions as a global sustainability challenge. This study examined how climate resilient land use planning shapes long term infrastructure project sustainability using multi country secondary data drawn from internationally standardized planning, climate risk, governance, and infrastructure performance datasets. The study was motivated by the persistent gap in global infrastructure research, where land use planning is treated as contextual rather than causal despite growing evidence that exposure is locked in before construction. The research objective was to explain infrastructure sustainability through a planning led framework that integrates risk informed zoning, adaptive spatial allocation, and integrated hazard mapping under differing governance conditions. An advanced quantitative design combining multilevel panel regression and structural equation modeling was applied to capture both direct and conditional effects across institutional contexts. Results showed that preventive spatial planning exerts a strong and consistent influence on infrastructure durability, operational continuity, maintenance efficiency, and service reliability, with zoning exclusion and hazard integration emerging as dominant pathways, while governance context amplified rather than replaced planning effects. This research model contributes through the addition of a planning led resilience context, thereby broadening explanatory scope and offering a refined framework for understanding infrastructure sustainability under climate stress in cross country settings. The findings connect local planning practice to global debates on climate adaptation, infrastructure finance, and sustainability theory by demonstrating that upstream land decisions deliver higher long term returns than post damage correction. The study recommends repositioning climate resilient land use planning as a core instrument in global infrastructure policy, investment appraisal, and sustainability assessment to reduce systemic risk and improve long term service outcomes.