EVALUATING THE IMPACT OF CLIMATE CHANGE ON THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT USING GEOSPATIAL TECHNOLOGIES IN BHUBANESWAR, INDIA

Abstract

Fast population growth is a significant contributor to worldwide land scarcity and has a long-term impact on the environment and climate. Rapid urbanisation along with industrialisation contributed to land transformation across the globe. Understanding, monitoring, and mitigating the environmental impacts of urbanisation are critical for sustainable development. Also, Rapid urbanisation has contributed significantly to regional and global temperature. Land surface temperature (LST) has long been regarded as a critical physical metric for analysing regional and global climate change and its effects on many ecosystems. Remote sensing is an effective method for monitoring and quantifying urbanisation and assessing its impact on regional heating. This paper examines the combined impact of land use and land cover (LULC) change and climatic variability in Bhubaneswar city using remote sensing, geographic information system and google earth engine. Images from the Landsat were utilised to prepare the LULC, LST and NDVI layer for 2001, 2010 and 2020. The random forest method of supervised classification was employed to estimate the LULC. According to this study, the impact of urbanisation shows that the built-up areas in Bhubaneswar City have increased by over 70% at the cost of agricultural land and vegetation cover. The finding also indicates the urban area has been expanded around 12 percent where LST has increased by 4°C in the last two decades. As a result, continuous monitoring of LULC dynamics is required to guide sustainable land-use decisions that promote environmental protection and economic development in this region. A multi-temporal environmental analysis of the region is critical for future environmental planning, such as the restoration of damaged areas, to be more effective and efficient. This study, thus, would be helpful for the administrators, urban planners, and policymakers for proper planning and sustainable development of Bhubaneswar City.