Abstract
This study aimed at reviewing the case examples of environmental assessment of development projects within management zones, identifying problems and improvement opportunities and suggesting the direction of environmental assessment for management zones that are increasingly segmented Findings showed that first, the assessment of environment soundness in management zones must incorporate the national land environmental map and wide-area ecological axes established by the Ministry of Environment. Second, regarding development activities in management zones, rather than an issue of simply destroying natural environment in a development site itself during a development period, an issue of permanently isolating ecosystems from surrounding areas in a mid/long-term perspective and continually polluting water in mid-stream/upstream regions where sites are located must be considered. Third, in the case of development projects with vast areas, existing plant communities will be disturbed and the naturalness of vegetation will gradually decline due to foreign tree species introduced for landscape architecture. Therefore, creating buffer forests at forest boundaries and planting native tree species that are same as nearby tree species must be examined. Last but not least, when assessing the environmental soundness of management zones, it would be crucial to comprehensively review the environmental, social and locational features of management zones, including surrounding areas, and set the direction of environmental assessment accordingly.
