Abstract
Land use-land cover change (LULCC) is driven by the interplay of forcing factors that act at global, regional, and local levels. Previous studies investigated mainly the basic socioeconomic drivers of LULCC. However, these studies less considered climate change vulnerability as a potential driver. Hence, this study is aimed to assess LULCC drivers in more fragile and dynamic landscapes of the East African Rift Valley region for the period of 1986-2016. We used a combination of Remote Sensing, Geographic Information System, logistic regression, and descriptive statistics to quantify and analyze the data. Image analysis results indicated that during the overall study period (1986-2016), grass/grazing land, agricultural land, and bare land have increased by 124%, 42%, and 34% respectively, whereas scattered acacia woodland, bush/shrubland, and swampy/marshy land have declined by 52%, 50%, and 31%, in that order. This image-derived change trend is in line with farmers’ perceived results. The top most influential drivers of LULCC includes population growth (95%), fuelwood extraction (93%), agricultural land expansion (92%), charcoal making (92%), climate change/recurrent drought (79%), and overgrazing (71%) in descending order of percentage of respondents. Education level and age of farmers significantly (p<0.05) affected their perception towards less perceived drivers. Hence, in order to reduce the adverse socio-environmental impacts of spectacular LULCC in the region, policy and decision makers need to take into account such principal drivers, particularly population growth and climate change.
Highlights
Land use-land cover change (LULCC) is driven by several interacting factors that act at global, regional, and local levels
The results indicated that rural farmers of the study area are well aware of and have a good perception of historic LULCC (Table 1)
About 89% of respondents witnessed an increase in the bare land, whereas only very few respondents perceived no change for acacia woodlands, water body, and barren lands during the same period
Summary
Land use-land cover change (LULCC) is driven by several interacting factors that act at global, regional, and local levels. Anthropogenic-related drivers such as population growth (Geist et al 2006; Meshesha et al 2014), urbanization (d’Amour et al 2017; Wang et al 2016; Yirsaw et al 2017), agricultural expansion (Ramankutty et al 2006; Mustard et al 2012), pasturing (Wassenaar et al 2007), and global market forces (Lambin & Meyfroidt 2011; Lambin et al 2003) are among the known drivers of LULCC Besides such basic human-related drivers, recent studies indicated that climate change vulnerability has a significant forcing effect on LULCC (Biazin & Sterk 2013; Kindu et al 2015; Lambin et al 2003; Reid et al 2000; Zessner et al 2017). This is true in developing countries where agriculture is the backbone of the economy
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