Exploring the Land Use Land Cover Change and its Implications for Climate Regulation in the Ibadan Metropolis

Land use/land cover is one of the major common global environmental challenges. Land use explains the interactions between humans and the environment, the results of anthropogenic activities, and the changes resulting from the activities. These changes contribute greatly to Earth–atmosphere interactions, biodiversity loss, and forest degradation. The detection of changes in land use/land cover gives important information about the trends in these changes. Their analysis will help to make informed and necessary decisions for climate regulation policy in Ibadan. This study analyzed the land use and land cover dynamics of the 11 local governments in the city of Ibadan using Landsat images taken from USGS Earth Explorer. The images were classified by Maximum Likelihood classification into four LULC classes: bare land, built-up areas, vegetation, and water bodies. The results showed that, in the city of Ibadan, there was a 29.93% decrease in land covered with vegetation between 2002 and 2022; 20.4% of vegetation areas was converted into built-up areas; and about 8.2% of vegetation areas was converted to bare land . The share of built-up areas increased from 10.32% of the total area to 36.12% in 2022. The NDVI result (0.59 in 2022, 0.56 in 2014, and 0.39 in 2022) showed a decrease in green areas due to the increase in built-up areas. This study revealed that urbanization processes are mainly responsible for land use/land cover change in Ibadan. In conclusion, this study advanced our knowledge of land use/land cover in Ibadan by providing information that is useful for policymakers and will help guide meaningful actions toward climate regulation.