Resettlement and its impacts on land use land cover change in Nansebo district, Ethiopia

Understanding the land use land cover dynamics and its drivers is essential to generate evidences for making appropriate interventions to safeguard the environment. The study assesses the impacts of resettlement on the Land use land cover (LULC) change in Nensebo district of Ethiopia using remote sensing and in situe field surveys over a period of 33 years (1986–2019). Four years’ temporal satellite images 1986, 2000, 2011 and 2019 were used to assess the LULCC. Supervised maximum likelihood classification algorithm was used to classify the images. A multi-stage sampling procedure was used to select the study district, three kebeles and respondents. From a total of 987 households, 285(29%) household heads were selected using simple random sampling. Questionnaire survey, key informant interviews, and focus group discussions were employed to address the drivers. The result showed that there was a rise of farmland from 9.27% in 1986 to 31.55% in 2019 with a rate of 7.30% per annum. Conversely, forest cover was shrinking from 84.40% in 1986 to 57.87% in 2019 with a rate of 0.95% per annum. The study also revealed a significant conversion of shrubland and forest cover to farmland with 58.2% and 29% respectively over the study period. The study revealed that the rapid rate of deforestation and LULCC were attributed to proximate drivers (commercial farmland expansion, resettlement, forest fire, population growth, illegal logging, charcoal and firewood production) and underlying causes (population pressure, poverty, land scarcity, and weak law enforcement). Thus, making appropriate interventions aimed at ensuring sustainability of environments by protecting forests and grasslands and minimizing livelihood dependence on the environmental resources is necessary.