The West Africa Land Use and Land Cover Trends Project is a unique and unprecedented effort to document and quantify the impacts of the environmental and land resource trends that are sweeping West Africa. The overarching goal of this activity is to provide decision-makers with information about natural resource trends in the region and engage them in modeling future scenarios that will contribute to the formulation of sound and sustainable policy responses. Ultimately, the results will be improved natural resource management, conservation, and food security.

The countries of West Africa are experiencing rapid change at many levels – climatic, environmental, agricultural, demographic, political, and socioeconomic. They are endowed with a highly diverse, yet fragile environment. For centuries, humans have been a trivial factor in the environmental equation, but this changed dramatically in the last 50 years as population pressures increased. As West Africans enter the 21st century, environmental changes are predicted to accelerate, with unknown and potentially serious implications for both its people and the natural resource base on which the majority of the population is dependant.

The project is being carried out through the AGRHYMET Regional Center and its national partners across West Africa, the Sahel Institute (INSAH), with technical assistance from the U.S. Geological Survey’s EROS Data Center. Through this program, AGRHYMET has been able to obtain complete, detailed satellite images from the Corona and Landsat satellite systems covering all of West Africa at four points in time: the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 2000s. The program provides training to environmental scientists from 15 West African countries in the analysis of this rich image archive, allowing them to map and quantify the land use and land cover changes that have occurred across the region in the last 35 to 40 years.

As a result, land resource trends, particularly changes in land use and land cover, have been quantified for most of the Sahelian countries from 1965 to 2002. This has resulted in:

An improved understanding of the biophysical aspects of land resource change;

An improved understanding of severe land degradation and its impacts on land productivity;

Lessons learned from regions that have experienced stability in land cover and natural resource conservation;

An initial understanding of the basic driving socio-economic and climatic forces driving change;

Increased public awareness of environmental issues;

A better ability to predict and project land resource changes over the next four decades and their potential impacts on land resources and human livelihoods.

AGRHYMET and the EROS Data Center will provide training based on the vast satellite image record of West Africa to help national land management institutions effectively map and monitor land resource changes with a view to increasing their understanding and improving their ability to predict some of the fundamental impacts of these changes on the environment and human well-being. The results will be invaluable for decision-makers as they face the challenge of balancing food production while protecting the environment from degradation.

USAID/WARP’s major collaborators on this project are the AGRHYMET Regional Center (http://www.agrhymet.ne), the Sahel Institute (INSAH – http://www.insah.org), the U.S. Geological Survey’s EROS DATA Center (http://www.usgs.gov), and the World Resource Institute (WRI – http://www.wri.org).