Assessment of Stakeholders’ Perceptions of Landuse/Landcover Change Drivers in Abuja, Nigeria

Abstract

Landuse/Landcover (LULC) changes are recognised as some of the major causes of environmental problems like land degradation and climate change. To achieve sustainability, we need to properly understand such changes in order to have adequate information that will enable us to design and implementing measures to mitigate their negative impacts. Doing this particularly requires a proper understanding of how stakeholders perceive the changes in general and their drivers in particular. Unfortunately,not much is known for many areas about the perspective of landuse stakeholders on drivers of LULC changes. This paper reports the results of a study conducted to examine the perceptions of different landuse stakeholders on drivers of LULC changes in Abuja Federal Capital Territory, Nigeria.Questionnaire survey was utilised, involving 514 households across four settlements, 2 rural (Karshi and Orozo) and 2 urban (Nyanya and Karu) towns in the territory, which were complimented with Focus Group Discussions were conducted. The results obtained showed that urban dwellers are largely aware of drivers of changes in socioeconomic drivers (physical development on lands, more commercial complex development and more institutional development). Rural dwellers are largely aware of environmental drivers of LULC changes (bush burning, livestock overgrazing, collections of wood and medicinal plants,and agricultural expansion). It was concluded that there is the need to bring about a harmonisation of the perceptions of LULC change drivers by the rural and urban dwellers so as to bring about a common front understanding and responding to LULC changes in the study area.