Population Growth and Land Use Land Cover Change Scenario in Ethiopia
Land use and land cover change (LULC) is widespread, accelerating, and significant processes driven by human actions but also producing changes that impact humans. These changes can alter the availability of different biophysical resources including soil, vegetation, water, animal feed and finally it leads to a decreased availability of different products and services for human, livestock, agricultural production and damage to the environment as well. Understanding land use land cover change with relation to population growth at various scales is vital for development of management strategies to tackle further decline of natural resources. In connection to this, a seminar paper was done to assess the relationship between population growth and land use land cover change in Ethiopia. Recently published articles, books, proceedings, dissertations and government reports were used as a secondary data source for this review paper. The result reveals that in Ethiopia there were considerable LULC changes in the second half of 20th century particularly in the highland part of the country. Forest and woodlands coverage of the country was declined from 40% in the early 20th century to 15% Similarly, the population was rapidly growing from 41.2 million in 1985 to 63.5 million in 2000 and it was reached 96.6 million in 2015. Based on these results it can be concluded that, LULC change and population change have a strong relationship; as population increases the need for cultivated land, grazing land, fuel wood; settlement areas also increases to meet the growing demand for food and energy, and livestock population. Similarly, rapid population growth exerts pressure on the existing land resources through increasing the demand for food, wood for fuel and construction purposes, and other necessities.