Analysis of land use land cover changes and population dynamics in Awash River Basin (ARB), Ethiopia using GIS and remote sensing.

Alongside population expansion and global warming, land use land cover change (LULCC) is a vital component of environmental change on a worldwide scale. In many developing countries, the dynamics of land use and land cover are becoming increasingly noticeable, and the main causes of these dynamics are globalization, rapid economic development, and population augmentation. The primary cause of human-induced land use and land cover change, which primarily occurs in nations like Ethiopia, is rapid population increment. The study area, the Awash River Basin (ARB), has several serious problems, including growing population, urbanization, water resource scarcity, and land degradation. The dynamics and relationship between population growth, land-use, and land-cover change in the study area with respect to flood threats were to be examined in this study. LULCC imbalances were examined and comprehensive supervised land use classification maps were created using the geospatial techniques used in GIS and RS. In the same year, the 1990, 2000, 2010 and 2020 classifications had estimated overall accuracies of 94, 97.6, 99, and 96, with kappa coefficients of 0.92, 0.97, 0.99, and 0.95. In general, there was a 1.3% decrease in agricultural land over the three decades (1990-2020); however, there was a 50% decrease in bare land, a 43% decrease in deep water bodies, a 13.7% increase in forest cover, a 191% increase in the wetland category, and a 121% increase in urban area. The population is expected to expand by 8.638 million to 16.8 million between 1990 and 2020. The results of the Pearson correlation analysis showed that the bare land, deep water bodies, agricultural land, and forest coverage all had negative Pearson r figures (- 0.75, - 0.49, - 0.28, and - 0.25, respectively). On the other hand, both urban and wetland areas have favorable correlations with population growth (0.94 and 0.89, respectively). Furthermore, for 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2020, the corresponding annual estimated land consumption rate (LCR) was 0.29, 0.28, 0.26, and 0.34. Flooding may have resulted from changes in land use and land cover since then due to population growth and growing amounts of built-up land. In order to mitigate the effects of flooding and unanticipated rapid land use change, it is crucial to take into account nature-based solutions that are characterized as sustainable. Furthermore, this research helps to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals for 2030: Goal 15 involves investigating land use changes and conservation efforts to protect ecosystems and biodiversity.