Land Management a Decade on from the Millennium

The Joint FIG Commission 3 and 7 Workshop and 2010 Annual Meeting of Commission 3 took place in Sofia, Bulgaria, from 15th to 17th November 2010.

Workshop
The Workshop, organised by FIG Commissions 3, Spatial Information Management, and 7, Cadastre and Land Management, and the Chamber of Graduated Surveyors of Bulgaria, was opened by the Minister of Regional Planning and Public Works, Rosen Plevneliev, who underlined the need for spatial information for the development and the economy of Bulgaria. The Minister also emphasised the important role of Bulgarian surveyors in implementing the cadastre and infrastructure improvements such as motorways and bridges, planning, construction and other land-management activities.

Further Funding
Progress in the Bulgarian cadastral project was presented, with an emphasis on the need for further funding for continuation and finalisation of this complex undertaking. The need to provide new tools for land and information management to respond to emerging challenges from the economic crisis and climate change were also discussed. The need was recognised too for international coordination between government and public- and private-sector surveyors to achieve the desired results in relation to land administration. Surveying education linked with cadastre was another matter discussed.

Invited Speakers
Invited speakers of international repute were Robert W. Foster, FIG honorary president, who gave a speech on ‘225 Years of Land Management in the United States’; Rumyana Tonchovska, senior land administration officer at the Environment, Climate Change and Bioenergy Division, FAO, on ‘Information and Land Management in Support of Good Governance’; Helge Onsrud, FIG honorary member, on ‘Protecting Land in Norway Through State Ownership and Public Restrictions on Private Land’; and Otmar Schuster, who presented resolutions emerging from an interesting workshop held in Duisburg in September last year on land transactions in the digital age.

Young Delegates
There were more young surveyors participating than usual this year due to the Bulgarian, Italian, Greek and Israel delegations. More detailed information, papers, presentations and resolutions from this workshop will be available soon on the FIG Commission 3 and 7 websites.

FIG Commission 3
FIG Commission 3 finished its four-year work plan in Sofia. During this period the Commission has focused on investigating problems related to current urban growth, and on identifying appropriate land tools for good governance. The technical programme included an opening, seven technical sessions and a closing session which took place at the headquarters of the Agency of Geodesy, Cartography and Cadastre. In total 38 papers were presented and almost eighty participants registered for the workshop from eighteen countries: Bulgaria, Canada, Cyprus, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iran, Israel, Italy, FY Republic of Macedonia, Nigeria, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, USA and FAO. The optional double-blind peer review of submitted papers was applied for a fourth year in a Commission 3 workshop.