Changing land cover: Clustering of agents per moral responsibility and culpability

Abstract

Are all humans morally responsible and deserving of blame for land cover change? Land cover change research has yet to provide an answer to this moral question. The purpose of this study was to answer the moral question of land cover change by conducting a land cover change analysis in six sampled metropolitan/municipal/districts [MMDAs] in Ghana, identify the agents of land cover change, and cluster the agents based on their moral responsibility and culpability. Supervised classification of Landsat images from 1987 to 2022 for the six MMDAs indicated that farmlands increased the most in area size although one-third of the respondents (agents) were into farming and agro-processing occupation. Based on respondants actions, knowledge and norms they were clustered into seven groups (“responsible and culpable”-25.1 %, “responsible due to culpable ignorance”-17.7 %, “responsible although lack knowledge”-14.1 %, “responsible due to weak norms”-9.1 %, “not responsible”-11 % and “not responsible due to culpable ignorance”-9.3 %) using Mason moral responsibility and culpability decision tree. The large number of respondants found to be responsible and culpable was because they had less knowledge about the consequences of land cover change, which limited their participation in environmental protection initiatives. The findings give sufficient evidence to promote educational programs for responsible land cover conservation and alternative livelihoods programs in Ghana.