CHAPTER 4 MODELLING LAND USE CHANGES IN THE BONSA CATCHMENT,
4.2 Introduction
A country’s land cover/land use patterns over a period of time are determined by demographic, economic and environmental driving factors (Verburg et al., 1999; Castella et al., 2007) both at a national and global scale. An understanding of the patterns and the processes of land cover/land use changes is vital for effective land use planning (Dietzel and Clarke, 2006; Kamusoko et al., 2009) and sustainable natural resources management (Castella et al., 2007). In Sub-Saharan African countries, such as Ghana, the majority of economic activities are centred on the exploitation of natural resources, which has resulted in rapid degradation of the natural environment over the past several decades. The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Ghana increased from $8 billion in 1984 to $32 in 2010 (Kwakye, 2012).
The increase in GDP has mainly resulted from growth in mining, oil and the agriculture sectors, including cocoa, tuber and fruit production, which have caused substantial land cover changes in Ghana.
Although several land use mapping (Braimoh and Vlek, 2004; Kusimi, 2008; Attua and Fisher, 2010; FAO, 2010b; Ruelland et al., 2010; Aduah and Aabeyir, 2012; Laurin et al., 2013; Aduah et al., 2015) and a few land use modelling studies (Mertens and Lambin, 2000;
Braimoh and Vlek, 2005; Judex et al., 2006; Houessou et al., 2013) have been conducted in West Africa; in Ghana there is still a considerable knowledge gap on land use change processes, patterns and their driving forces at the local scale. In Ghana, only one study (Braimoh and Vlek, 2005) has attempted a quantitative explanation of the land use change processes in relation to their driving forces for the northern savannah ecological zones. To the best of our knowledge, there is a lack of deeper understanding of the land use change processes in the rainforest regions of Ghana. Studies in rainforest regions of Ghana have
71 mainly quantified the land use changes (Attua and Fisher, 2010; Schueler et al., 2011; Aduah et al., 2015), none attempted to gain a quantitative and deeper understanding of the processes of changes in relation to their driving forces. Several case studies worldwide (Verburg and Veldkamp, 2004; Judex et al., 2006; Kamusoko et al., 2009; Verburg and Overmars, 2009;
Vermeiren et al., 2012), show that there is a potential for a deeper understanding of the land use change processes in relation to their driving forces at the local scale, through spatially distributed land use modelling, using easily accessible data.
Land cover/use models provide a means to generate multi-temporal land cover maps from which the dynamism in land cover can be ascertained. During the past three decades, models have been used to establish quantitative relationships between land cover changes and their driving factors, in order to generate an understanding of the change processes and to simulate dynamic land cover/land use (Verburg et al., 1999; Hu and Lo, 2007), which can be used for the assessment of impacts of either future changes or impacts of different scenarios of changes (Robinson et al., 1994; Dietzel and Clarke, 2006). The application of dynamic land cover/land use in impact studies ensure that extreme and unrealistic assumptions of land use changes, such as complete deforestation, re-forestation or urbanization, which are common in impact and scenario studies (Legesse et al., 2010; Moradkhani et al., 2010; Mango et al., 2011), are avoided. Land use models also contribute to effective planning by allowing the evaluation of different development scenarios (Dietzel and Clarke, 2006; Vermeiren et al., 2012). This is especially important for data scarce regions, such as the Bonsa catchment in Ghana, where there is limited satellite images and aerial photographs, to derive land cover maps at regular time intervals.
Land cover models can be classified as stochastic or deterministic (Park et al., 2011b). The stochastic models include Markov Chains (MC), logistic regression (LR) and Cellular Automata (CA), while the deterministic models include Agent Based Models (ABM) (Dietzel and Clarke, 2006; Matthews et al., 2007; Bakker and van Doorn, 2009; Le et al., 2012) and models based on Geographical Information Systems (GIS). Though stochastic models incorporate biophysical, demographic and economic driving factors to simulate land use changes, they have difficulty in incorporating agents (Bakker and van Doorn, 2009;
Arsanjani et al., 2013). Agents include factors that are based on human decisions and activities. Purely statistical models also have a limitation in terms of dynamic modelling of the competition between different land uses (Verburg et al., 2002; Dietzel and Clarke, 2006).
72 The Dynamic Conversion of Land Use and its Effects (Dyna-CLUE) model, however, combines features of both deterministic and stochastic modelling, as well as estimation of land use demands, based on a Markov chain or any other appropriate technique (Verburg et al., 1999; Verburg et al., 2002; Verburg and Veldkamp, 2004; Verburg and Overmars, 2009;
Chu et al., 2010; Park et al., 2011a; Hu et al., 2013). The advantage of using the CLUE family of models is that they can model the dynamic competition between multiple land use types (Verburg et al., 1999; Verburg et al., 2002; Verburg and Veldkamp, 2004; Verburg and Overmars, 2009). Other models such as the SLEUTH (Dietzel and Clarke, 2007),‘SimAmazonia’(Soares-Filho et al., 2006), Fore-SCE (Sohl et al., 2007) and LTM (Pijanowski et al., 2006) use integrated modelling as well. However, SLEUTH and LTM were developed for urban simulations, while ‘SimAmazonia’ was developed for deforestation modelling in the Amazon basin and Fore-SCE was developed for the great plains of the United States. Additionally, although ABM models account for human actors and their interactions on the environment (Parker et al., 2003; Dietzel and Clarke, 2006), they are complex (Bakker and van Doorn, 2009) and they require extensive datasets (Park et al., 2011b), which are not available for data scarce catchments.
This study aims to extend the knowledge on spatial patterns of land use changes in relation to their driving forces in West Africa, by conducting an empirical spatially distributed land use modelling, using the Bonsa catchment in southern Ghana as a study site and it builds on a previous land use change analysis study by Aduah et al. (2015). The Bonsa catchment is one of the forested catchments in Ghana, which has undergone significant land cover changes in the past three decades (Aduah et al., 2015), following the liberalization of Ghana’s economy.
The potential impacts of the rapid land cover changes, have substantial negative socio- economic, environmental and health impacts on the communities in the catchment. Studies have shown that over the years, both surface and groundwater quality in the catchment has decreased (Akabzaa and Darimani, 2001; Kortatsi, 2003; Akabzaa et al., 2009; Armah et al., 2012), while air pollution by airborne particulates from surface mines is increasing (Akabzaa and Darimani, 2001; Bansah and Amegbey, 2012). However, a deeper understanding of the quantitative relationships between the land cover types and their socio-economic and biophysical driving forces, which is necessary for effective land use planning, is non-existent in the Bonsa catchment. This study was therefore specifically conducted to determine the significant driving forces of land use changes and to simulate land use maps for historical, as well as future time slices for the Bonsa catchment, using logistic regression, Markov chain
73 and the Dyna-CLUE models. The future land use maps were based on three plausible scenarios: i) the business-as-usual (BAU) scenario, where the current economic and environmental objectives persist, ii) the economic growth scenario (EG), where economic development is assumed to be promoted through expansion in mining operations, as well as increased rubber production and (iii) the economic growth and reforestation, which is similar to the EG, but prescribes higher rates of forest rehabilitation. Each of the scenarios cover the time slice from 2012 to 2070. The data generated can be used to gain a deeper insight into land use change processes, as well as guide effective land use planning and enables assessment of the impacts of land use changes on the environment.