Land Use and Land Cover Change in Africa: Implications on Landscape Multifunctionality

Despite a favourable natural resource base, Africa continues to suffer from high rates of poverty and slow rates of economic growth. Two-thirds of the population in Africa depends on agriculture for their livelihoods. However, a major portion of Africa’s agricultural productivity is static or declining due to soil degradation and climate change. Degradation of forests and woodlands, for instance, has intensified due to rapid growth of human populations that rely on fuelwood for cooking and heating. A few other spatially explicit factors that influence land use and land cover are population density, agricultural expansion, elevation, rainfall, and the distance to roads and settlements. The interactive effects of these drivers that influence land use and land cover change should be considered during decision-making to reduce degradation of land resources used to sustain livelihoods. In this study, Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) detection of Africa over 2017–2022 was analysed using the ESRI Global Land Cover dataset. The results show significant change during the period. Trees, crops, rangeland and built-up areas showed an increasing trend of 0.62%, 0.36%, 0.27 and 0.15%, respectively, while bare ground showed a decreasing trend of 1.26%. For the vast number of countries in Africa whose economies rely on agriculture, net gain changes in LULC associated with crops and rangelands are inevitable in achieving food security. Sustainable land management practices and their upscaling in sub-Saharan Africa are essential for a variety of reasons, but the most basic is to sustain and improve livelihoods while protecting the land’s resources and ecosystem functions. There are some successes in implementing sustainable land management in Africa including agroforestry, community-based natural resource management and the great Greenwall Initiative. Sustainable management of African savanna calls for developing silvicultural systems in the context of understanding the key attributes of African savanna plant species, as this is the basis for addressing the current unsustainable harvesting practices across African savanna landscapes.