International Journal of Plant & Soil Science

Many areas of the Middle-east and North Africa (MENA) are experiencing land use change. The causes of this vary but include urbanisation, deforestation, and the greater issue of climate change. The implications of such land use change are broad but key problems include desertification and loss of land productivity.
In Libya, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence regarding changes in land use, but very little empirical evidence exists to quantify these changes. This paper is one of the first to quantify land use change in the eastern part of Tripoli. It shows how rapid urbanisation has affected the land use and land cover. Multi-temporal Landsat TM and ETM+ imagery has been used to determine and detect land use/ land cover changes from 1986 to 2009 with the help of land sat images based on remote sensing data. The remote sensing data used the Image Classification method is applied to classify the study area into four categories including urban area, forest land, bare land and irrigated farmland. Between 1986 and 2009, the urban area almost doubled in size from 4,997 ha in 1986 to 9,653ha in 2009 while forest land dropped by 1,793ha during the same period. Bare land, however, increased in size by 2,353 ha and irrigated farmland had reduced by nearly 65% in size during the study period. The outcomes revealed a significant increase in urban expansion alongside a significant decrease in agricultural land use over the 23 years period. The analysis indicated that this trend has emerged due to a direct exchange of agriculture, forest and bare land, for urban development.
The implications of such massive changes, in a relative short space of time, indicate that there is a significant and growing problem for Libya. If this pattern of land use change is happening throughout Libya the potential impacts on food productivity and water availability could undermine the sustainability of the whole nation. More research needs to be undertaken to find out how communities are affected by these changes and how they are responding to these challenges. This issue needs to be a priority policy area for the new Libyan government.