Land use change and its driving forces in the Koshi Hills, Eastern Nepal

Abstract

In rural Nepal, development efforts often mean increasing the production and productivity of Arable land. Therefore, the land resources remain often changing its use. This paper intends to analyse the change in land use and land cover categories due to the intervention of different development activities in the eastern hills of Nepal during the past two and half decades. Both analogue and digital data have been used from three different sources including the Land Resource Mapping Project (LRMP, 1986), toposheets from 1996, and Landsat imagery from 2010. The spatial data generated was verified in the field via observation, a ‘Reality Check Approach’ (RCA), and consultation workshops held in the four districts such as Bhojpur, Dhankuta, Sankhuwasabha, and Terhathum. An attempt has also been made to identify the possible factors responsible for land use changes. Five broad categories of land uses, such as arable land, forest, shrubland, grassland, and others (water bodies, snow land, bare land, rock and ice, settlement built-ups, and roads), have been determined, based on 1996 toposheets. In the Koshi Hills, significant changes have occurred particularly in forest land, with it increasing consistently over the past 24 years, whereas cultivated land first increased during 1986–1996 and then decreased from 1996 onwards. In agriculture, while traditional subsistence cereal crops have been replaced with commercial vegetables and high-value crops such as large cardamom, ginger, seeds, and fruits, particularly around the roadsides, what has also happened is that patches of abandoned agricultural land have been observed due to a tendency of local youths migrating outwards to areas away from direct road access. The Community Forestry Program, the construction of roads, and the introduction of improved agriculture development programs have contributed to the internal trading between major land cover/use categories. These have brought benefits like nature conservation, national and international trade of local products, and improved living conditions for local communities. It is therefore possible to exhibit spatial relationships between development interventions and land use change on a GIS framework.