Challenges and Impacts of Green Belt as Air Pollution Control

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Air pollution. (Source: The Conversation)

The development of traffic volume has always been the main cause of decreasing air quality in an area. The higher the use of motor vehicles, the worse the air quality produced. Decline in air quality is experienced by urban areas that have undergone many changes in physical development, such as the presence of factories, buildings, and paved roads. This will decrease the actual area of green, open land which would otherwise cool the city and potentially maintain the quality of comfort and freshness of the air.

Green Belt is needed to overcome all problems of air pollution contained in the urban area. The Green Belt itself is the physical separation of urban and rural areas, in the form of free zones or green open buildings or spaces that surround the outlying urban areas (Basri, 2009).

Green Belt has many benefits, such as being one form of city forest that can maintain the survival of the earth. The Green Belt is able to clean dust, chemical substances that have fused in the air, as well as carbon dioxide or CO2, trees and other vegetation that will maintain the health of the air by absorbing particles; in addition Green Belt can also be a heat absorber in urban areas (Jieqing et al., 2017).

The lack of Green Belt in an urban area that has undergone air pollution will greatly affect the quality of human life, especially the community whose residence is adjacent directly to the main causes of pollution areas such as factories and roads.

Green Belt procurement should be thoroughly calculated regarding the location or the vegetation to be planted, because of the effectiveness of vegetation in reducing air pollution determined by the type of the plant and the leaf structure. If applying Green Belt means using a tree that has a wide leaf shape and a tight pattern, this has a higher effectiveness in reducing air pollution because of motor vehicles and industries. 

The Green Belt development must be located in a place in need of improvement in the air quality or other pollution problems. In addition to the area, it must have sufficient land for Green Belt development, to maximise its function. When the Green Belts are wider, the planted trees will given a more tight cover, so as to maximise the absorption of particles and dirty substances that have fused in the air.

The purpose of this research is to investigate the challenges and the impacts of Green Belt as an air pollution control. The procurement of Green Belt is certainly intended to control various existing environmental problems such as air pollution. The method used is a qualitative method. The authors conduct library research by collecting literature data from various sources. The technique can help to explain the impacts and challenges in Green Belt development, and the impact of Green Belt on the surrounding community.

The result of the study showed that Green Belt is a solution that controls environmental damage, especially in air pollution. With many problems, challenges often arise, in this case the lack of land for the construction of greenbelt areas and also the limitations of vegetation suitable for an environment. The more densely packed a city is, the more difficult it is to determine which plants are suitable for planting on minimal land, because plant vegetation will greatly affect the effectiveness of Green Belt work.

Green Belt has many impacts to overcome environmental damage, such as being able to neutralize the air pollution in urban areas from motorized vehicles and factory waste. In addition, the development of Green Belt directly impacts people’s livelihoods if the vegetation planted is in accordance with the livelihoods of the majority of the community in the Green Belt area. 

The role of government is also very influential in the development of Green Belt. The Government should be very concerned with the problems of air pollution and create a Green Belt policy especially in urban areas.

Authors : Puji Sucia Sukmaningrum, Tika Widiastuti, Lina Aprilianti, Ersa Dwi Aprilianto, Muhammad Madyan

Details of the study, The Challenge and the Impact of Green Belt as an Air Pollution Control can be viewed on:

https://www.ijicc.net/images/vol10iss12/101235_Puji_2020_E_R.pdf

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