5 Developing Urban Adaptation Strategies for Global Warming by Using Data Mining Techniques: A Case Study of Major Metropolitan Areas in Japan Yu-Chi Weng Division of Environmental Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Hokkaido University Japan 1. Introduction Modern life and high population density is the main characteristics of cities. Urbanization diffuses all over the world in recent centuries. Metropolitan areas are formed to provide more industrial production as well as business communication. Furthermore, economies of scale arising from spatial concentration of activity within industries in metropolitan area, i.e. industry agglomeration (Rosenthal & Strange, 2001); population, resources, capital concentrate into the cities. Industry agglomeration makes cities more adaptive to uncertainty of business environment (Strange et al., 2006). Hence the most profit seems to be created in metropolitan area in this globalization age. Nonetheless, natural resources are rapidly produced into goods, consumed and transformed into side-products, e.g., solid waste and a variety of pollutants, into the environment. Besides, more and more infrastructures are developed in the progress of civilization, but only a few natural habitats are preserved, leading to the decreases of biodiversity (van Bohemen, 1998; Mcdonald et al, 2008). Though people have convenient life in metropolitan area, however, the urbanization is bringing about a great deal of critical global environmental changes. In particular, the enhanced global warming, due to the urban growth, is threatening the human security and the possibly irreversible changes on ecological systems in a variety of dimensions and scales (Chung et al., 2009; Firman et al., 2011; Kataoka et al., 2009; Khasnis & Nettleman, 2005; Robert & Cory, 2003). Thereby, it is imperative for the municipalities to develop adaptation strategies for metropolitans in the context of human security, urban sustainability and urban growth. In the progress of making urban growth policies, important factors should be taken into consideration from the socio-economic, environmental, cultural, public health and ecological perspectives regarding the potential threats of global warming. Several types of environmental indicators are developed to diagnose the current situation and formulate adaptation strategies against the global warming and associated issues of urban sustainability. Normally, recent studies argued that the urban sustainability should take the composite system ecology into consideration, implying that the interactions of the stakeholders in the city have to be considered in the evaluation simultaneously (Mistch, 2003; Roseland, 1997). Also, several evaluation bases could be used to examine the