Manila: Voting 224 - 3 with zero abstentions, the House of Representatives on Tuesday approved on third and final reading the proposed National Land Use Act, a long-awaited measure that seeks to put order, science, and long-term planning into how the country uses its land and natural resources.
According to Philippines News Agency, House Bill No. 8466, which is part of the Legislative Executive Development Advisory Council (LEDAC) bills, establishes a national framework for the rational, holistic, just, and sustainable use of land and natural resources across the country.
House Majority Leader and Ilocos Norte Rep. Ferdinand Alexander 'Sandro' Marcos said the bill is a practical reform that will help address concerns on food security, disaster resilience, housing, infrastructure, and the daily lives of communities that have long suffered from confused, conflicting, and outdated land use policies. "This is one of those bills that people may not talk about every day, but they will feel it when farms are protected, homes are built in safer places, roads are planned better, and communities are spared from avoidable disasters," Marcos said in a statement.
In a separate statement, Leyte Rep. Ferdinand Martin Romualdez, one of the principal authors, emphasized the measure gives the government a clearer way to balance development with protection, especially in a country where poor land use decisions often end up hurting farmers, settlers, commuters, and disaster-prone communities. "Land use sounds technical, but at its heart it is about fairness: where people can live safely, where farmers can keep producing food, where businesses can invest responsibly, and where government can build without creating new problems," Romualdez said. "We have to push development that is planned, useful, and felt by the people, not development that fixes one problem while creating another," he added.
At the center of the measure is the creation of the National Land Use Commission under the Office of the President, which will serve as the highest policy-making body on land use and physical planning. The commission will prepare a 30-year National Physical Framework Plan, to be updated every 10 years, that will guide the country's planning for settlements, production areas, protection zones, infrastructure, transmission corridors, and other major land uses.
The measure also requires regional, provincial, city, and municipal land use plans to be harmonized with the national framework, so that local development, zoning, and infrastructure decisions will no longer move in different directions. It classifies land use into four major categories: protection land use, production land use, settlements development, and infrastructure development.
A major feature of the bill is the protection of prime agricultural lands, especially areas critical to rice production and food security, from unnecessary or improper conversion. The bill also penalizes illegal conversion of agricultural land into residential, commercial, industrial, or other non-agricultural uses without the required clearance or conversion order.
The bill also integrates climate and disaster risk planning by requiring the use of hazard maps, geospatial data, and environmental assessments in deciding how land should be used, especially in flood plains, critical watersheds, coastal zones, and other hazard-prone areas. It recognizes ancestral domains and the rights of Indigenous Cultural Communities and Indigenous Peoples by requiring that land use plans in ancestral domains be formulated with respect for traditional resource and management systems.
The measure also protects forests, watersheds, mangroves, coastal zones, national parks, heritage areas, and cultural properties, while providing for a national base mapping program, a national geospatial information program, and a national hazard mapping program. To ensure implementation, the bill provides incentives and technical assistance to local government units that update and enforce their land use plans, imposes penalties for violations, and creates a congressional oversight committee to monitor the law's rollout.
