The land use planning and analysis system of the systems research network in Asia

Agricultural systems in South and Southeast Asia are being challenged by the requirements of increased productivity, more diversified products, and environmental protection. Optimizing future land use in such complex situations requires new partnerships between planners, scientists and decision makers and new methodologies and tools that can support decision-making on the most beneficial use of land and other natural resources. The Systems Research Network for Eco-regional Land Use Planning in Tropical Asia (SysNet) was established in late 1996 to develop methodologies for exploring alternative options for agricultural land use and rural development. The methods and tools that are needed to analyse various scenarios of future land use in order to guide policy changes are operationalized into a land use planning and analysis system (LUPAS) which has three main methodology components: (i) land evaluation; (ii) scenario construction; and (iii) multiple goal linear programming (MGLP). This paper describes LUPAS and illustrates the capability of this modeling framework by discussing a few examples from an on-going study for the province of Ilocos Norte, Philippines. The results imply that water availability is an important constraint to agricultural development and improving the irrigation systems would result in higher productivity and more income for the province.