GIS-based Sustainable Land-use Planning: A Case Study of Batticaloa Municipal Council

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. xix 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.