Evaluation of green infrastructure in Iskandar Malaysia

Abstract

Green infrastructure is becoming an intentional development of green and blue networking in corridors and living spaces of cities in developing countries. The services include providing ecological framework for social, economic and conducive environmental health. This encapsulates sequestering and storing excessive CO2 from atmosphere, serving as regional carbon sink. Nonetheless, urbanization, land-use change and deforestation has led to disappearing of trees and water bodies. This developments causes escalation of high temperature, increase in greenhouse gas emission, flood, flow of strong wind and tsunamis. For this reason, there is a need to ascertain the conservation and integration of green and blue spaces in fast growing cities. However, cities in developing countries are subconsciously overlooking the values and benefit of green infrastructure while undergoing urban development processes. Hence, this study aimed to identify the awareness and understanding regarding the concept of Green infrastructure in Iskandar Malaysia. The study conducted a questionnaire survey by distributing instruments to seven experts, both from public and private sector. Eight green infrastructure where found available in Iskandar Malaysia: (1) parks, playing fields, (2) pocket spaces, (3) bodies of water, (4) Neighborhood open spaces, home gardens and roof top garden, (5) Courtyards, (6) Bioswales, and permeable pavement, (7) hill forests, and (8) Loose-fit places. Notwithstanding, this study attests the decline of green in the city corridor consequent to uncertainty and indecisiveness of identifying the availability hill forests in Iskandar Malaysia. This needs the attention of replantation in line with the policy of reforestation. For this reason, the study profoundly explored ten more green infrastructure needed to be included in Iskandar Malaysia during developmental processes. This include (1) street furniture/road furniture (led/solar), (2) recycle bin, (3) EV charger, (4) rain harvesting system (SPAH), (5) bicycle lane, (6) Fountains in the building complexes, (7) landscape surrounding the undeveloped pocket land, (8) shaded walkway, (9) beautified and multi-functional water detention pond, and (10) electric bus. Lastly, this study affirms regulatory, technical, contextual, structural and culture/behaviour as barriers towards improving green infrastructure in Iskandar Malaysia. Moreover six more barriers were explored as additional barriers from this study including (1) financial/budget allocation, (2) maintenance cost, (3) conflict for determine lead agency/department, (4) enforcement and up keep of the facilities, (5) the problem of financial allocation for agencies and (6) the high cost burden for developers to implement. It is recommended that Malaysian government should keep upholding the reforestation policy in every of its urban development processes. Moreover, it should provide a blueprint for implementation of green infrastructure in Iskandar Malaysia cooperation between the public and private sectors. Moreover, the government need to advance development and changes of GI in Iskandar Malaysia through implementation of related projects as an incentive. Henceforward, for future research it is suggested to explore the aforementioned confirmatory findings interacting with experts and community participation through semi-structured interviews, participatory observations, and Delphi-technique or focus group discussions. The exploratory findings will emerge new criteria and dimensions of improving the GI in Iskandar Malaysia.