Land Use Planning In Malaysia

Wetland, watershed and wildlife habitats are some of the land uses in Malaysia. Discuss the roles of Land Use Planning in the management of these land resource in the context of Malaysia.

i) The role of land use planning

Every development need a proper land-use planning. Development growths everywhere and brings neither enhancement impact nor good. When it’s not manage the way it should be, a conflict over the land use usage might be a serious case for the next generation. Land-use planning bring a meaning of an amount of land to be generate which have a specific function for different human purposes or for any economic activities. Environmental factors such as wetland, watershed and wildlife habitats are almost important for land use planning.

A stakeholder is anyone or any institution who has interest in, or is affected by an issue or activity and therefore has a natural right to participate in decision making relating the land use. For example in ESA such as wetland, watershed and wildlife habitat the stakeholder that responsible are Department of Wildlife, Department of Agriculture, Department of Forestry , JAKOA , Department of Wildlife with authorities such as City Council. Those stakeholders has range of policies and laws to guide the management of ESA in the country. Policies are in place to integrated biodiversity conservation and ecosystem management in development and planning process. This include National Physical Plan, which determine the general direction and trends for physical development in the country. Such as National Policy on the Environment (2002), the National Policy on Biological Diversity (1998), National Wetland Policy (2004) and National Agricultural Policy. Land and natural resources in Malaysia are mainly managed at state level and as a result state government have established their own policies and regulations. Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) is a planning tool where it’s main purpose is to give the environment its due place in the decision making process by clearly evaluating the environmental consequences of

Individuals involved in biodiversity planning and policy will therefore need to be familiar with the operating practices for each sector, the actual and potential impacts of that sector on biodiversity , sectoral management practices and their values for conversation and sustainable use of biodiversity. Many sectors have specific biodiversity-relevant knowledge in the form of information (including traditional knowledge) and resource management technique that can be utilised to achieve national policy goals and in particular, the objectives of the National Policy on Biodiversity and the National Policy on the Environment. As an example of the latter , the Town and Country Planning Department is using Sustainability Assessment and more agencies will according to the 9th Malaysian Plan . Whenever an agency embarks on Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) or other mainstreaming process it will require support from Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (NRE) . Indeed , there is (as already stated) a clear and unique role for NRE to act as mainstreaming consultation and facilitation body for synthesised data on biodiversity issues and proprieties to support federal, state and local planning levels. Nevertheless , SEA has been applied successfully to long-term policy and plan preparation/review (Sadler, 2004