Quantifying the Interactions of Landuse Allocation and Coastal Zone Systems: A Conceptual Framework

Abstract

This paper presents a conceptual framework to quantify landuse interactions with coastal zone systems from planning perspective and its validation in a coastal zone stretch in Kerala, South India. Firstly, coast critical landuses are identified and using AHP, their relationship with an existing metric named Coastal zone Health Indicator (CHI) is assessed (CHI is a composite indicator to quantify holistic coastal zone systems’ status from landuse planning angle).  For this, an expert questionnaire survey is employed to explore landuse impact proneness of CHI attributes; a matrix named CHI Landuse Interaction Matrix (CLIM) captures this. The CHI models and CLIM are integrated to form the framework to compute CHI changes based on landuse options. For validation, real-life landuse allocation cases are considered on a coastal zone of known CHI values in Kozhikode, Kerala and the results are discussed. The proposed framework with CHI benchmarks can assess and quantify landuse impacts better.