Analysis of Land Use /Land Cover Dynamics In Relation To Urban Expansion: The Case of Hawassa City, Ethiopia
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Date
2025-04-01
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Addis Ababab University
Abstract
Land Use and Land Cover Changes (LULC) are some of the worldwide factors that have the most impact on city growth. This study examines land use and land cover changes in relation to urban expansion in Hawassa City. The objectives of the study include quantifying land use and land cover changes over three decades, examining public perception on urban green infrastructure and land use management, physical and socio-economic driving forces of land use and land cover change, and identifying challenges of urban land management. The data were collected through questionnaires, interviews, and key interviews. Finally, the data were analyzed in different ways, using figures and tables, for example. Descriptive and econometric models were also used to analyze the data and probit regression models were used to investigate the impact of urban expansion on the livelihood of displaced farmers in the surrounding area. The study used multi-spectral satellite images from 1990 and 2020, and employed packages like QGIS version 3.2, ArcGIS 10.3, ENVI 4.2, and ERDAS Imagine 2013 for image classification. Descriptive and econometric analyses were used to analyze both quantitative and qualitative data using SPSS version 25. Multivariate analysis of variance indicated that the effect of urban expansion on the combined dependent variables, namely, on land use, socioeconomic activities, culture, and environmental change, is statistically significant F(8, 616) =12.704, p = 0.000, Wilk’s Lambda (λ) = .737, partial eta squared(partial η2) = 0.142, observed power = 1.000. Comparatively, the area covered by farmland, built-up areas, and bushland increased from 19.46% to 26.51%, 11.97% to 18.71%, and 3.07% to 4.51%, respectively. Hawassa City has developed very rapidly, growing from a surface coverage of 4.98 km2 in the 1983s to built-up area coverage of around 48.29 km2 in 2018. The mean score for the level of social relationship and values after land expropriation was 1.7 moderate, with a standard deviation of 0.852 in comparison with the mean score for the level of social relationship and values before land expropriation, which was 3.21 high, with a standard deviation of 0.79. There isn’t much of a difference between them in the second category, where the lease price was increased from the starting price by (457%) from 2015 to 2016. The f-statics or f-ratio were 91.656 and the sign value of highly significant as (p=.000<0.01).
Keywords: Change detection, Green Infrastructure, Land Use/ Land Cover, Informal Settlement, Probit model, Urban Expansion.