A national Land Use policy is the core element to achieve the optimal utilisation of land resources, while adopting sustainable land use practices. It is an inherent part of the economic infrastructure of a country,
and an essential prerequisite for its sustainable development. A proper-implemented land use policy provides a solid foundation for strengthening of the agricultural sector and facilitates creation of work opportunities in rural areas. Furthermore, it provides a solid basis for the orderly land market, as well as for the fair and equitable land taxation, possibly to be implemented in the near future. Given the current state of the environment of Albania, being subject to a growing concern, a clear assessment is required of the potentials of land and of the existing farming systems, as well as an identification of the policy alternatives to attain these potentials, in order to develop adequate and sustainable land use plans.
The project Terms
of Reference give a complete overview of the project setup.
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- An Operational Manual to provide methods, standards, protocols and quality control procedures for integrated natural resources inventories (i.e. landscape ecology maps), mapping (scales, reliability, minimum management unit etc.), and land utilisation types (LUTs) models for crop and land use requirements, land suitability and environmental impact assessment.
- A Land Use Planning Application nation-wide, and for a pilot area at regional and local scale, featuring comprehensive thematic databases on natural resource, linked to a GIS to display and print data-combination maps.
- Appointment of a permanent Technical Advisory Committee. It will be responsible for co-ordinating, maintaining, up-dating, validating and fine-tuning procedures, standards and protocols related to land use planning.
- A GIS Infrastructure to process and harmonise data from different sources at a Central Node under MoAF.
- An International and Open Metadata Standard, containing information on Albanian present and future land data to be produced by the
project.
- Operation of a Web Page for the project, to publish results and on-going activities and to host the mentioned metadata base that can be queried to get up-to-date information about available spatial data in
Albania.
- A National Workshop to be organised in order to present, explain and discuss the set up of the GIS system, its applications in land use planning, follow-up proposal, including activities to maintain and upgrade the
system
- National Staff Training Courses in land use planning procedures and GIS to maintain project facilities and implement further land use
planning.
- A Critical Review of the Existing Legislation on natural resource management10. Legal and Administrational Strategy to support the land use planning and use policy in general (institutionalising the process) and in
detail.
- A Critical Review of Legal Instruments related to data policy (copyrights, internet publication, etc.) in an international context will be produced
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