Simple Land Use Accounting

 To determine the areas for suitable development, there is a need to deduct first the following land uses and categories from the the total land area:

A.   Protected areas

 

i. NIPAS

strict nature reserves

national parks

natural monuments

wildlife sanctuaries

protected landscapes/seascapes

resource reserves

other protected areas (e.g. virgin forests)

 

ii. Non-NIPAS areas

reserved second growth forests

mangroves

buffer strips/easements

freshwater swamps/marshes

critical watersheds

 

B.   Other reservations

 

i. military and civil reservations

ii. mineral and geothermal reserves

iii. water courses and surface water

 

C.    Environmentally critical areas

 

i. water-related hazards

ii. earthquake-related hazards

iii. volcanic-related hazards

iv. erosion-hazards

D.    Protected agricultural areas

 

               i.    highly restricted agricultural lands - SAFDZ

E. Heritage sites

 

GIS will be very helpful tool in doing land use accounting. GIS Sieve Mapping screens out of consideration those areas that ought not to be built over due to various types of constraints such as physical or environmental (e.g. flood prone areas) and political or legal (e.g. protected areas). Sieve mapping is a necessary support to the land accounting procedure because some of the areas that are not suitable may overlap and are counted twice or many times over. With the aid of maps a particular area with several overlapping constraints is counted only once under one constraint. This way, multiple counting is avoided.

 

 

Reference:

Serrote, Ernesto M., Rationalized Planning System, 2008, p. 100