Assessment of landscape carrying capacity approach in Hungarian spatial plans and related legislative environment

Abstract

It is vital to better integrate the landscape carrying capacity approach into humanmanaged systems because of the growing negative impacts of human activities and global/local processes. One potential integration area is the spatial planning system. The aim of this paper is to exploret he prevalence of landscape carrying capacity approach in the selected legislative environment of spatial planning, and larger scale spatial plans. The evaluation was based on a system of targeted questions. The landscape carrying capacity approach appears in partly defined and partly focused regulations in the legislative environment. In the case of large scale spatial plans, the evaluations of the landscape carrying capacity approach are mainly based on statistic, descriptive and quantitative assessments. However, several development points of landscape carrying capacity were identified in the case of large scale spatial plans and the related legislative environment. The legal environment can be improved by integrating a conceptual framework for landscape capacity, application of standards-based quality requirements for spatial planning documents, in addition to quantitative ones, and more elaborate specification of guidelines related to landscape potential. For spatial plans, it is proposed to apply a more comprehensive general methodology for landscape capacity assessment, which integrates natural and built elements of the environment with socio-economic indicators, using more qualitative indicators and extending process-based assessment further. Currently, the changing of the legislative environment is likely to have the largest impact on the manifestation of landscape carrying capacity approach in the near future.