Unrelenting innovations often offer profitable opportunities to investors. But for sustainable development, an effective land administration system backed by cadastral surveys to identify and subdivide land is needed. Then, there has to be a land registry system to support simple land trading along with land information system for an easy access to relevant information.
The second session of the Day 2 of the Symposium on Land Administration titled Modern Land Administration, Innovation and Investment for Sustainable Development was themed around tenure security, achieving UN sustainable development goals, and property rights in effective land and property markets for the foundation of an efficient and productive economy.
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the critical link between land and disaster, which is likely to impact the future economic outcome in land market decline and subsequent security of tenure. A new era in land administration is emerging for an agile and effective programme, which will transform land administration globally.
Underpinned by emerging policies, principles of interoperability, standardization and pragmatism, a range of sustainable and scalable private sector services are emerging, and enabling innovations and automation in national land administration sectors.
Commencing the session, moderator Brent Jones, Global Manager, Cadastre/ Land Records, ESRI, said, “Secure rights, land market and automation caught his attention.” He added that land market drives up economy and that the GDP is directly related to the total value of real estate.
Moving on, Kirsikka Riekkinen, Assistant Professor, Aalto University/WPLA, Finland Land Administration Supporting National Security, said, “Our studies are largely inspired by the current or recent geopolitical changes in the world. We did have some law amendments related to real estate transactions and ownership. Since 2020, we have amended three laws related to right of owning and buying land. Also, there are pre-emption rights related to national security and possibilities for expropriation in certain cases.”
“We look forward to having secure land tenure, support planning and land development, and enhancing economic growth. In a way, real estate and national security are intertwined. And, to get a better understanding of it, we have to figure out whether real estate as an object is posing a threat to national security or it’s just a subject of national security threat. Either the threat is related to access to the real estate or the sector itself is a threat. Land use is another risk factor. So, it becomes imperative to find out which entity is responsible for land use. Also, open data does not come without risks. More interfaces would only lead to data misuse and cyberattacks,” Riekkinen said.
Focusing on land-related issues in rural belts, Myriam Martinez, Director, National Agency of Land, Colombia, said, “Our mission is to execute the policy of social ordering of rural property. Our goals include access to land for peasants who do not have it, providing them legal security and promotion of social function of land. In the last three-and-half years, peasants have largely benefited under the peace with legality policy. We are working on ways to address people’s problems through collaborative models like social cartography and photo identification through orthoimagery.”
Giving more insight, Maria Ovdii, Head Department Geodesy, Mapping and Geoinformatics, Agency for Land Relations and Cadastre, Republic of Moldova, said “Apart from implementing the land policy, we have laid emphasis on maintaining and managing NSDI geoportal along with monitoring and reporting spatial data infrastructure at all levels. Also, our focus areas have been mapping and creating cadastres.”
“Land policy is the most complex issue, followed by land administration, which encompasses all activities associated with the management of land and natural resources, required to achieve sustainable development. The real estate registration system is expected to provide security of ownership rights, necessary information, and property value to the realty sector and government institutions for urban planning and land management. Also, we managed to form a geoportal for data sharing,” Ovdii shared.
The session culminated with a video from Geosciences Australia on space and spatial integration, 2020 bushfires, COVID and flooding events in eastern Australia. A peep was given into how the country’s digital atlas creates a secure, dynamic, location-based and collaborative public data platform.
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