Abstract
The rapid expansion of urban areas due to rise in population and economic growth is increasing additional demand on natural resources thereby causing land-use changes especially in megacities. Therefore, serious problems associated with rapid development such as additional infrastructure, informal settlements, environmental pollution, destruction of ecological structure and scarcity of natural resources has been studied carefully using remote sensing and GIS technologies for a rapidly grown megacity namely, Delhi. The present work evaluates the land use/land cover (LULC) changes and urban expansion in Mega city Delhi and highlights the major impact of rapid urbanization and population growth on the land cover changes which needs immediate attention. The results indicate that the city is expanding towards its peripheral region with the conversion of rural regions in to urban expansions. Built-up area of Delhi witnessed an overall increment from 540.7 km² to 791.96 km² or 16.86% of the total city area (1,490 km² ) during the study period 1997 to 2008 which mainly came from agriculture land, waste land, scrub-land, sandy areas and water bodies. The increment in forest cover of 0.5 % is very small when considering the increment in built up category to 17%. Total area of waterbodies has reduced by 52.9% in a ten year period (58.26 km² in 1997 to 27.43 km² in 2008) with shallow waterbodies now having a dismal presence. LULC changes are studied with the urban growth parameters such as population, vehicles, gross state domestic product etc. The results lay emphasis on the concepts of urban planning to be applied such that more consideration is towards the preservation and management of natural land use classes which will increase the quality of life in an urban environment.
Highlights
Urbanization is a gift to the human society if it is controlled, coordinated and planed
The Central and East Delhi remained almost unchanged because they already witnessed urbanization earlier; leaving very less scope for further development. As shown in this figure, there is a significant increase in the less dense built-up area by 180.09 sq.km (12.08% of the total area) and moderate increase in medium dense built up area by 72.68 sq.km (4.87% of the total area) while a marginal decrease of 1.46 sq.km (0.1% of the total area) is reflected in the dense built up area
It is obviously clear that increase in built-up area in the city has been on the expense of majorly from the agricultural and waste land together with the shrinking waterbodies
Summary
Urbanization is a gift to the human society if it is controlled, coordinated and planed. Since ecosystems in urban areas are strongly influenced by anthropogenic activities, considerably more attention is currently being directed towards monitoring changes in urban land use/ land cover (LULC) [6]. Such studies are important because the spatial characteristics of LULC are useful for understanding the various impacts of human activity on the overall ecological condition of the urban environment [7]. LULC change due to human activities is currently proceeding more quickly in developing countries than in the developed world, and it has been projected that by the year 2020, most of the world’s mega
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