Qatar is a Middle Eastern country characterised by an arid climate. Key challenges in urban planning in general are uncertainties of the future, especially when it comes to water resources and specifically storm water. While textbook of urban planning concentrates the most on social and economic factors that promote prosperity for the communities, in many arid areas the concept of planning from a climate change and specially storm water might be looked at as the least important in the priority list of criteria required for a successful and practical urban planning. This situation poses a challenge to urban planners in general, especially with limited available standards and criteria of planning from a storm water and climate change perspectives. This paper intends to shed some light on the above-mentioned challenges of planning from storm water perspective and provide a more practical approach to urban planning from climate change perspective, and aims at providing the urban planning community with the basics of optimizing the challenge of rainfall and possible flooding in such an arid area like Qatar.