Pulau Burung’s suboptimal land is the overlap of flatland, lowland, wetland, and peatland. In managing land with peat characteristics, water management becomes the most important aspect of ensuring sustainability.
In his days, our founder worked on a water management system to address the challenge of suboptimal land. The soil is highly porous, which allows too much water seepage and excessive evaporation, which become more serious during the dry seasons. The Water Management Trinity (WMT) was then established for capturing and keeping freshwater as a resource instead of letting it leave back to the ocean.
The WMT comprises of three main components (i.e. the Canals, the Dams and Water Gates, and the Dikes) which supports the three aspects of sustainability. It is still being used until now and has been acknowledged as first of its kind in the world.
Environmentally, the WMT is evident to enable our lands to be fire proof. It ensures our lands to receive the amount of water needed to keep the soil moisturized while slows down subsidence and abrasion as the dikes and water gates minimize the rain to erode the topsoil.
The WMT also ensures the provision of freshwater supply, that is a vital for regulating all economic activities in the vicinity, including the agricultural development, industrial operation, and human survival.
These impacts of WMT supports the idea that cultivating suboptimal land is more viable in a long run compared to expanding arable land in a habitable or densely-populated area. The process may require higher initial investments for making the land less acidic and building basic infrastructures. However, afterward, it produces a better quality of arable land and requires less maintenance expenditure in the long run.
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