Natural resources base in Bangladesh, especially the land in fragile condition. For sustainable economic development proper management of its land and environment is a must in the country. To this end Bangladesh must adopt sound landuse policy to guide productivity, sustainable living and environment conservation. However, this pursuit of policy making for landuse and environmental conservation it is an utmost necessary to explore the present landuse pattern or condition, its trend and nature of dependency on land, land management scenario and information and knowledge base for land development.

The present study under the project “ Sustainable Land Management and Landuse Zoning in Palas and Tangail Sadar Upazilas” is an effort to conduct landuse survey in two upazilas, Palas and Tangail Sadar, located in the central part of the country by using modern methods and techniques. The study generated huge amount of data on various issues related to land and environment, agriculture and natural resources and created a geospatial database with an appropriate and operational land management system to be used by the Ministry of Environment and by other interested policy makers, academia and planners of the country.

The study is designed to collect information from primary and secondary sources.  As such qualitative and quantitative data will be collected to the plot to plot landuse survey. Mainly two types of survey will be carried out;

1. Plot to plot Landuse survey, and
2. Socio-economic Survey in household level

As land is the most precious resource in Bangladesh, the proportion of land under each category of use is so important which generated as a result of interaction between natural environment and human environment. The major categories of landuse identified the study area were agriculture, residential, commercial, industrial, institutional, transport and communication. Besides, there were water bodies, vegetation and fallow land. These are in fact very common type of landuse, can be found in all areas of the country.

The focal objective of the survey was to find changing pattern and land use tendency in given geographical location. The major concern of the study was to find the relationship of man with environment through the utilization land, and to find the ways and means to manage the precious land resource for sustainable development and environmental management.  It finds out from the survey that the proportion under each use has been undergoing rapid changes, and some of the changes were found to be alarming from economic and environmental point of view. The process of unplanned land utilization is modifying and also affecting our environment.

Regarding these concern, this study suggests implementation of land zoning throughout the country. The objective of the land zoning is to assess the land resource in four categories, encouraging optimal use of land resources to facilitate broad-based social and economic development of the country without upsetting or endangering the ecological balance of the environment.

The study was managed by a research team led by Professor Dr. Nurul Islam Nazem, Honorary Secretary of the Centre for Urban Studies.