article · Land
Mining operations in Southeastern Katanga drive deforestation, habitat degradation, and unplanned urban sprawl. By examining landscape changes around the agglomerations of Lubumbashi, Likasi, Fungurume, and Kolwezi between 1979 and 2020, this investigation tracks how human activity reshapes local environments. Natural cover, which was predominant in 1979, shrank by more than 60 percent across four decades. It was largely replaced by agricultural production, energy sourcing, and expanding settlements, with landscape disturbance accelerating rapidly between 2010 and 2020. Predictive modelling using Markov chains indicates that urban built-up areas will become the dominant landscape feature in Lubumbashi by 2060 and in Kolwezi by 2075. These dynamics validate the transition model from nature to agriculture and finally to urbanisation in tropical settings, emphasising the immediate requirement for territorial planning and sustainable energy alternatives to reduce environmental strain.
Unregulated expansion and heavy reliance on charcoal around mining hubs threaten vital natural ecosystems. Demonstrating how quickly natural land converts first into farmland and subsequently into dense urban settlements provides regional authorities with clear timelines. This foresight helps spatial planners design targeted territorial development plans and introduce cleaner household energy alternatives before peri-urban natural buffers disappear entirely.
The abstract does not indicate a direct commercialisation pathway, but the predictive spatial models could inform territorial development planning and municipal land management. Urban planners, regional authorities, and developers of alternative energy solutions to charcoal could utilise these projections to target interventions. As an analytical simulation, the work represents applied research that requires translation into civic policy and planning tools rather than direct market sale.
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In Southeastern Katanga, mining activities are (in)directly responsible for deforestation, ecosystem degradation and unplanned building densification. However, little is known about these dynamics at the local level. First, we quantify the landscape anthropization around four agglomerations of Southeastern Katanga (Lubumbashi, Likasi, Fungurume and Kolwezi) in order to assess the applicability of the Nature–Agriculture-Urbanization model based on the fact that natural landscapes are replaced by anthropogenic landscapes, first dominated by agricultural production, and then built-up areas. Secondly, we predict evolutionary trends of landscape anthropization by 2090 through the first-order Markov chain. Mapping coupled with landscape ecology analysis tools revealed that the natural cover that dominated the landscape in 1979 lost more than 60% of its area in 41 years (1979–2020) around these agglomerations in favor of agricultural and energy production, the new landscape matrix in 2020, but also built-up areas. These disturbances, amplified between 2010 and 2020, are more significant around Lubumbashi and Kolwezi agglomerations. Built-up areas which spread progressively will become the dominant process by 2060 in Lubumbashi and by 2075 in Kolwezi. Our results confirm the applicability of the Nature–Agriculture-Urbanization model to the tropical context and underline the urgency to put in place a territorial development plan and alternatives regarding the use of charcoal as a main energy source in order to decrease the pressure on natural ecosystems, particularly in peri-urban areas.
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DOI: 10.3390/land11060850
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