Handbook for recognising and planning green infrastructure
logical areas, parks and gardens, buildings with parks or gardens, areas with commemorative facilities and places, cultural landscapes, settlements and their parts which, together with their protection regimes, also represent a green potential and ES supply, especially in terms of tourism and education.
5.1.3
Land usage
Land usage: using an earth’s surface, defined based on its current and planned/permitted functional dimension or socioeconomic purpose (e.g. residential, industrial, agricultural, recreational usage, etc.). Land usage is divided into the existing/actual and planned/intended use. Actual land use: an area of the earth’s surface defined based on its existing cover, functional dimension or socioeconomic purpose. Intended land use: an area of the earth’s surface which, in line with the spatial acts, is defined based on its planned functional dimension or socioeconomic purpose. The actual use determines the actual status of an area, while the intended use defines the harmonised planning and the placement of various harmonised sectoral usages in an area. In our land use analysis for recognising GI, we used the data on the actual land use (http://rkg.gov.si/ GERK/documents/Sifrant_rabe.pdf) (Ministry of the Environment and Spatial Planning - Spatial Planning, Construction and Housing Directorate). Because GI planning mainly deals with harmonising clashes and seeking synergies with the other existing and planned usages of space, it is efficient to also use the information about the planned land use (the existing municipal spatial plans and the applicable spatial arrangements of the long-term and medium-term plans of municipalities) in this process, as well as the registry of persons who need to obtain the integral environmental permit for IED (former IPPC), the registry of persons subject to the SEVESO directive, the cadastre of the public economic infrastructure, etc. During the analysis of sea and coast usage in terms of recognising GI, we took into account the entire area of the Slovenian sea with the main recognised usages at sea: international navigation corridor, areas prohibiting sea voyages, fishing areas, mariculture areas, anchorages and the port of Luka Koper, areas of other ports.
In the EU and in other parts of the world, farm production and farmland are defined differently. In some countries (e.g. Austria), farmland is part of the GI, because it provides an important supply service, i.e. food. The main question concerns the intensity of food production. A higher intensity and therefore more produce means large cultivable monocultures and uniform surfaces, and a higher usage of fertilisers and plant protection products. The above worsens or completely erases supply of other ES that the natural (or close to being natural) ecosystem offers. With such management, newer measures need to be sought to preserve the scope of producing food, which leads to an even bigger vulnerability of the environment and man. In the event of major social, economic or climate changes, such governance could immediately fail, there are no available adjustments, or the environment requires decades to recover. Preserving diverse ES in a certain area for producing food can result in higher costs and less produced food per hectare, but only currently. In the medium term, this cost is negligible, considering the benefits. 57
