Adopting information-based management to leverage smart territories

This post is written by Pedro Tavares of eBUPi - Simplified Land Digital Registry Mission Unit, Portugal.

• The problem: In Portugal, 91% of the land plots are private and for the vast majority of the territory it is unknown both who owns the land or the location of registered small areas.

• Why it matters: The lack of knowledge regarding the location of land plots and their owners has a vast impact on territorial planning, resource valuation and prevention of wildfires.

• The solution: A platform that allows landowners to identify their land, free of charge, in a simple and intuitive way, and also provides information that helps the government and other official organisations to better understand important data.

In Portugal, 91% of the land plots are private and for the vast majority of the territory, it is unknown both who owns the land or the location of the small areas already registered.

This current and historical situation highlights a recurrent challenge: how to prevent forest fires by better land cleaning, how to promote incentives for relocation to less populated territories if it is not known to whom these territories belong or which capabilities they offer? Or how to encourage new reforestation and afforestation policies, new methods of agricultural exploitation, land consolidation operations or property reparcelling, or the creation of new businesses when the simple basic necessary information is absent: who owns and where is the land located?

Historically land cadastre surveys and the land registry were based on a traditional on-site approach. Central administration would identify land plots both centrally and locally. This methodology would require significant resources and at a large cost. At the same time, given that the registry law in Portugal is declarative, even having a physical land on-site separation mark did not imply it was fully accurate.

All this context helped explain why Portugal has only had land cadaster for less than half the country - the south part of Portugal where large land plots and reduced arborisation helped the work.

But for the major part of the country (centre and north of Portugal), where eight million land plots are located (compared to three million on the south part) there is no land cadaster, and forest fires, like the ones that occurred in 2017, tragically killing more than 100 people, happen more frequently and severely due to to the climate emergency.

BUPi – The Digital Land Registry One-Stop-Shop was born to answer this purpose. It began as a pilot project and it is being expanded to the whole country. Today, it can be found in 132 Portuguese municipalities (out of 141 municipalities), and it will reach the remaining municipalities in Portugal that do not have a land registry yet.

"Simplified identification procedures have been created, and the registration of land plots is encouraged nationwide by being free of charge for a period of four years with the assurance of no tax increases."

How it works 

BUPi’s approach is based on two data sources: data collection, previously dispersed in different systems and organisations - all agencies that owned information related to land plots share this information, safeguarding two main principles: the non-existence of duplicate or even inconsistent data and the guarantee that the systems communicate with each other. The second, and the most important part, requires the mobilisation of millions of landowners to identify their land by photo interpretation using BUPi’s platform, both in person at more than 130 municipality service counters or online. All this information is then maximised by machine learning algorithms that will accelerate the identification process, suggesting land plot locations or even plot configurations.

To assure that this goal is achievable within a short timeframe it is essential to involve landowners and citizens who are often concerned, feeling that central government actions will imply more taxes and penalties. To this end, simplified identification procedures have been created, and the registration of land plots is encouraged nationwide by being free of charge for a period of four years with the assurance of no tax increases.

Knowing the ownership, location and property lines is essential to implement adequate policies for land use planning, for the municipal management of new “smart territories”, for the development of communities and local economies, which can finally, and now based on real data, take value from what is theirs. And obviously, the prevention of rural fires. It is, therefore, a collective value creation process, with more cohesion, which also contributes to reducing asymmetries.

What’s next

The BUPi platform is starting to provide information that helps to understand, for example, where there are more landowners, the size of the property, the history of rainfall or land use, combined with new data such as economic dynamics. All this is done using new advisory tech tools, enhanced by real-time indicators or even machine learning, which assist a new way of managing, with direct impact at a local level.

The BUPi platform, which already made it possible to know 42.5% of the area of the adhering municipalities by late 2021, is therefore the result of the consolidation process of scattered information and the direct contribution of the landowners. And the main goal is to know 90% of the territory by the end of 2023.

This is the starting point that will ensure greater protection of citizens' rights - through land registration - and greater simplification and harmonisation of the relationship between landowners and government. But it is also from here that it is possible to deepen a new form of management that creates more knowledge to better understand and, therefore, to better value our territory.

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(Image Credit: Unsplash)