Evaluation of Predicted Loss of Different Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) due to Extreme Coastal Erosion: A Case of Lower Meghna River Region of Bangladesh

Keywords: Coastal Erosion, Land Loss, Land Use and Land Cover, Lower Meghna River, Bangladesh
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Coastal erosion is one of the major natural hazards issue globally. It causes population displacement, loss of productive land area, loss of infrastructure and communication systems, and most importantly household livelihoods. With an aim to assess the impacts of historical and predicted shoreline change on different land use and land cover, this study estimated historical shoreline movement, predicted shoreline positions based on historical data, and quantified and assessed past land use and land cover change. Multi-temporal Landsat images from 1988 – 2021 were used to quantify historical shoreline movement and past LULC. To assess the impacts of coastal erosion on different LULC, historical and predicted shorelines were overlaid with classified LULC. Finally, the prediction accuracy was assessed using confusion matrix (e.g. recall, precision, F1 score). Our results suggest that the prediction accuracy for future land loss was much higher for the agriculture, forest, and inland water class where the urban class had lowest overall prediction accuracy. The agricultural land is found to be the most dominant land use that were lost over the last three decades. Due to erosion, substantial urban areas/human settlement were lost and a large number of people were displaced over the years. This is a methodological innovation which might be used for looking at future impacts of shoreline movement on different land use/ land cover. We believe that the findings of this study will be helpful for policy makers in managing and developing associated mitigation and adaptation measures for this part of the coast in Bangladesh.