Volume 13 (2020): Issue 1 (May 2020)

The present study shows the regulatory proposal related to plastic by the Peruvian government and also, the previous initiatives are described so that it can be taken as a reference for the successful implementation in other countries, taking into account the regulatory and business aspects at the same time.

Over decades human well-being has recognized from ecosystems, not only through material goods but also through nonmaterial assets namely cultural ecosystem services (CES). Regardless of increasing Ecosystem Services (ES) research over the last decade, cultural services assessment still remains neglected and is mainly limited to marketable services such as recreation and ecotourism. Obvious challenges in standardizing definitions and measurement units have brought about numerous difficulties in accounting cultural services and specific related indicators in decision-making processes. In that regard, the current review intends to create a reference list of CES categories and related measurement units with commonly used indicators. To put it another way, we analysis 80 publications to identify the most common CES indicators using in mapping various categories of CES approaches. Results prove that there are various methods can be used in assessing CES categories, whereas we found 57 indicators can be used for that and most of these indicators can be utilized in urban planning context as spatial indicators. Moreover, it is obvious that almost the same indicators can be used in evaluating most CES categories. For instance, in case of recreation and tourism indicators almost 50 % of all collected indicators can be used for mapping it, on the contrary, in case of spiritual and religious values. In conclusion, while there are various mapping methods of CES and different indicators, most of CES categories have relatively ignored by the planner and decision-makers such as education and inspirational values. Therefore, we recommend the use of the collected indicators and relevant measurement units in assessing neglected values in future research.

The endeavors to preserve the forest in Bali cannot be isolated from the existence of local wisdom. Customary law, as a decision of Hindu religious leaders in Bali, is one of the local wisdoms which has been maintained by the society. This study examined the values of local wisdom held by indigenous people and reviewed the preservation of forests from a Hindu perspective. This research was conducted in three villages in Bali, namely Tenganan Village, Manggis Sari Village, and Sangeh Village. The residents of these villages believed that forest is a sacred area which must be maintained and preserved properly.

Private green spaces are considered an important part of urban greenery. However, the extent of private green spaces in an informal city like Kabul is unknown. To this end, this study has mapped out the private green spaces in the informal settlements of Kabul city. A Geographic Information System (GIS)-supervised image classification technique was used to identify these private green spaces in three of the 22 police districts (PDs) in the city. Briefly, the classification consisted of defining training samples, extraction of signature and classification of the imagery. As a result, 330.3 hectares were identified as private green spaces, which made up 12.3 % of the total area of informal settlements in these three districts. With 217.1 hectares, PD7 had the largest area of private green spaces among the three police districts, contributing to 65.7 % of the overall area of private green spaces, followed by PD8 (21.3 %) and PD16 (13 %). In future, the map generated in this study could be used to monitor, manage and conserve the existing urban greenery in the face of private green spaces. The results could also be utilised by the Kabul Municipality and other relevant departments to implement an upgrading programme in the informal settlements of Kabul city, which would lead to fulfilling the environmental needs of the residents.

Salt accumulation within the soil is one of the subtle ecological issues around the world. An integrated of remote sensing with different statistical techniques has indicated accomplishment for creating soil quality forecasting models. The objective of this research was to unveil the degree and location of the salt affected soils as it has a severe effect on the agricultural crop yield of the Gautam Buddha Nagar (GBN) district. To assess spatial variation of the salt-affected soil a simulation model integrating satellite observation data, artificial neural network (ANN) and multiple linear regression (MLR) was used. The statistical correlation amongst ground-truth data and Landsat original bands and band ratios showed that all the bands and ratios showed a non-significant correlation with SAR. While four optical bands and eleven band ratios showed high correlation with all the soil quality parameters. Combining all the remotely sensed variables into models resulted in the finest fit with the R² value equal to 0.84, 0.69, 0.59 and 0.85 for EC, pH, ESP and TSS, respectively. The soil quality parameter maps generated using selected models revealed that most of the part of the agricultural land of the study area lies in the range of moderately saline and moderately sodic soil. Further Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) was applied to generate overall soil degradation probability map of the district, with respect to salt accumulation. The result revealed that the major portion of the entire agricultural field of the study area lie between low (32.74 %) to moderate (29.53 %) probability zones of salt susceptibility.

The contribution of Green Infrastructure (GI) in vital areas such as regional development, climate change, agriculture, forestry and environmental protection is already acknowledged and listed as one of the priorities in several key EU policies, and is the basis for the EU Green Infrastructure Strategy. However, the concept is not yet fully integrated into actual planning strategies, in this respect the Czech Republic is no different. A major problem in doing so is a lack of guidelines/ how to identify and map GI using available sources and thus keeping costs down. The existing data sources for land cover or land use often do not fulfil the requirements in terms of thematic coverage, resolution or accuracy. In order to work around such limitations, we analyse the existing land use/land cover data in the Czech Republic from the GI perspective. Furthermore, we propose a GI mapping methodology based on the diagnosis of three mapping approaches at the regional level, grounded on the utilisation and processing of different data sets. We compared GI maps based on European data from CORINE Land Cover Database, Czech national database called Consolidated Layer of Ecosystems (CLE) and combination of Czech national and regional data and manual vectorization. Our results show that CORINE based GI map is suitable for transnational scale but unsuitable for regional scale. The CLE based GI map is good for both national and regional scale but its information on GI in urban areas is lacking. The detailed regional GI map is good for regional and to some degree even for local scale but its creation is time consuming. However, careful combination of existing national and regional data can provide good outcome in creating GI map usable for territorial planning.