Abstract:
Land has been defined as the frequently available natural resource on which man can rely
to build their lives. Land-use planning is a planning technique to establish in advance the
quality of life on the earth. The decision-making process is focused on facilitating the
biophysical, socio-economic, environmental and public considerations which provide
numerous benefits for the public. The land is frequently utilized improperly due to the
1978 cyclone, the 2004 tsunami and the civil war over 30 years. As a result, the natural
environment has faced various challenges. Therefore, different spatial and temporal
scales need to be considered to asses sustainable land-use plans for the future generation
in Batticaloa Municipal Council.
The study aims to develop a GIS-based sustainable land-use plan for minimizing
environmental issues in Batticaloa Municipal Council. To achieve the aim, a mixed
method approach was used to make meaning of the sound effects of a sustainable landuse plan. The Landsat satellite images were used for temporal land-use analysis by
maximum likelihood classifier in the supervised classification method to evaluate the
existing land-use and land change modeler was used for the prediction of land change
over the 40 years, whereas, the improper land-use was determined by GPS pinpoints,
photographs and field observations. Furthermore, the questionnaire survey was evaluated
the environmental issues regarding to the improper land use practices by the hypothesis
test from urban dwellers and government officials.
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The results revealed that the built-up land-use has remarkably extended by 34.1% while
homegarden has minimal growth of 0.5%. But, agriculture, bare land, sandy and scrub
have declined to 9.5%, 8.5%, 4.4% and 2.1% respectively. According to the loss and gain
analysis, only built-up land-use has found that higher gain of 24.2% and wetland and
homegaren least gain of 3.2% and 0.5% respectively while other land-use of agriculture,
bare land, sandy and scrub loss of -9.7%, 8.2%, -6.7%, -3.5% respectively between 1980-
2020. However, projected land-use from 2020-2030, built-up, homegarden and sandy
would gain 3.2%, 1.9% and 0.1% respectively while loss of agriculture, wetland, scrub
and bare land as -3.4%, -1.0%, -0.4% and -0.3% respectively. Furthermore, improper
land-use of low productive agricultural land is identified at 23.7% and wetland at 2.6%.
According to the suitability levels, 88.2% of land can recommend as suitable for
sustainable land-use plans in future urban developments while 11.8% is recommended
for conservation to urban ecological management in Batticaloa Municipal Council.