Assessment of scenario-based land use changes in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh

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Land scarcity and land-hungry are two important terms are used for a highly populous country like Bangladesh. The only hilly area of Bangladesh, the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), is a forest dominated area of the country is also experiencing forest area and other land area changes. With the advent of time, changes of different factors like geophysical, socioeconomic, proximity to built infrastructure or climatic are producing changes in the spatial pattern of land use of the CHT. In this regard, it is crucially important to crystallize the dynamics of land cover changes for scrutinizing the underlying causes of land cover change patterns in the Hill Tracts area. With this view in mind, in the present study, we developed two scenarios (from 2010 to 2040) of land cover change like business as usual, plus environmental protection priority and predicted the future land cover in the study area. We employed the Dynamics of Land System (DLS) model to simulate the land uses based on the driving mechanisms. The findings implied a huge increment of built-up area with shrinkage of cultivated lands, forestry area and grassland from 2010 to 2040 under the business as usual scenario. While, under the environmental protection priority scenario, forestry areas, grassland, and built-up areas would expand with the contraction of cultivated land, and water areas mainly. The research findings offer worthwhile information for policymakers to conserve the environment and economic growth in a more sustainable way.