Abstract
ABSTRACTThe eco-environment in city Faisalabad has attained much consideration due to rapid urbanization and land-use changes in past few years. The purpose of this study is to analyse the impacts of land-use changes on regional climate by linking them with temperature and precipitation trend using spatio-temporal analysis and statistical method. Geospatial and remote sensing technique provides essential tools which can be used to interpret the land-use changes. Spatio-temporal land-use changes from 1985 to 2016 were analysed using unsupervised image classification technique. Land-use maps were classified into three main classes, namely agriculture, built-up and open land. The results indicate that agricultural land has continuously decreased by 37.79–10.23%, built-up area has increased by 33.07– 88.19% and open land has decreased by 29.13–1.5% from 1985 to 2016. Statistical analysis indicates that transformation of agriculture and open land into built-up land has led to rise in temperatures and annual rainfall trend in Faisalabad. Average increase in annual TMin, TMax and TMean was 1.2, 0.3 and 0.7°C, respectively from 1985 to 2016. Overall contribution of urban warming to total annual TMin, TMax and TMean was 12.31%, 1.95% and 5.42%, respectively. Annual rainfall is also increasing and it has increased by 120 mm from 1985 to 2016. Results indicate that temporal variations of annual temperature and rainfall are consistent with land-use changes in city Faisalabad, and significant correlation coefficients were found between them. It is recommended that this type of study is helpful for urban planners to control the urbanization properly especially in larger cities of Pakistan.
Highlights
It is considered that land-use changes at regional and global scales are the crucial driving factors of climate change (Foley et al 2005)
This study examines the impacts of land-use changes over the regional climate of city Faisalabad, where green cover and open land have been replaced with built-up land
The major cities of Pakistan are facing the urbanization problem as more people are migrating from rural areas towards urban areas
Summary
It is considered that land-use changes at regional and global scales are the crucial driving factors of climate change (Foley et al 2005). Some studies have shown that land-use changes induced by anthropogenic activities are the key factors which influence the regional climate (Bonan 1997; Paeth et al 2009). Urbanization is an extreme way in changing land use by human activities, according to their needs (Singh, Grover, and Zhan 2014). It has been considered that the number of people living in the world’s urban zones is projected to increase by 80% from 2010 to 2050 In 1981, number of people living in these cities were 1000,000 but later on there was a tremendous increase in population of these mentioned cities from 40% to 50% in 1998 (Arif and Hamid 2009)
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