Climate-Resilient Environmental Planning in the Awash River Basin, Ethiopia: A Geospatial Assessment of Environmental Change, Flood Hazard, and Nature – Based Solutions
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Date
2026-06-01
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Flooding is a major environmental factor in the Awash River Basin (AWB) which is accredited by a concerted transformation of land-use change with climatic variability, topographical landscape, and soil degradation. The current dissertation has attempted to outline the flood prone area of the basin using the GIS and remote sensing as well as understand the etiology and the effects of floods, the dynamics of climatic changes, the future losses of the soil and prescribe some sustainable nature based methods of mitigation. The analysis of climatic trend by non-parametric techniques has shown that there is a remarkable reduction in annual and seasonal precipitation over the last forty years including the fact that temperatures are characterized by their continuously increasing pattern especially during spring and autumn. The decrease in vegetation cover and rise in surface temperatures are supported by satellite-based NDVI and land-surface temperature, thus worsening the situation of hydrological extremes. The long-term period in the range of 1990 to 2020 covering land-use and land-cover change (LULCC) show strong increment in the extent of the urban (by 160%), agricultural land (15%) and wetland areas, which are accompanied by considerable declines in bare land area and deep water bodies, which is mainly explained by the high population growth in the period. Such changes have altered surface runoffs pattern and vulnerability to flood significantly. The map of flood hazard susceptibility prepared with the help of multi-criteria decision-analysis framework which considers the elevation, slope, drainage density, precipitation, soil type, riverine proximity, and LULCC reveals that over half of the basin is at high to medium risk of floods, with the model validated by ROC-AUC evaluation. A soil erosion evaluation using the Universal Soil Loss Equation (USLE) indicates the strong spatial variability in soil erosion and subsidiary of sediment transportation with the majority of the erosive activity taking place in the upper basin areas thus highlighting the significance of land-management measures and rainfall erosivity. Lastly, suitability mapping of nature-based solutions reveals that vast areas (38%) of the basin are highly to extremely appropriate to interventions like afforestation, wetland restoration as well as sustainable land management. In general, it could be concluded that the findings offer a unified scientific foundation of the flood risk mitigation, soil protection, and nature based climate-resilient planning in the Awash River Basin as a means of sustainable development and informed decision-making.
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Keywords
Flood hazard, Climate Variability, Land use land cover change, Soil erosion, Soil Sedimentation, Nature Based Solutions, NDVI, LST, USLE