**7. LULC situation in the South-West coastal area of Bangladesh**

### **7.1 Land and land-use pattern in Bangladesh**

Land is the basic natural resource that provides not only the habitat and nourishment for living organisms but also a major focus of economic and livelihood activities. With the increasing population, land is being converted from agricultural purposes to other uses (such as housing, roads, and urban development), and this trend is expected to continue. Around 220 ha of arable land are converted to industrial establishment, house, road construction, etc. every day [32]. Between 1973 and 2000, at least 86,000 ha of land were lost into river/estuarine erosion though this is compensated by land generated through accretion [33].

The Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics regularly publishes land-use pattern where importance is mainly focused on agriculture. Here, land-use system is usually determined by physiography, climate, and land height in relation to water level [34]. All these together make a highly complex environment characterized by five main land types: net cropped area, current fallow, current waste, forest, and area not available for cultivation. Besides this, the Soil Resources Development Institute (SRDI), Bangladesh, produces agricultural land-use maps for the country identifying many different types of agricultural land-use. An indicative land zoning consisting of the following eight zones was recommended by PDO-ICZMP [35]:


**29**

**Figure 1.**

*LULC classification map of Khulna District in 1988 and 2017 (source: [31]).*

area [13].

*Frequent Change of Land-Use Pattern and Its Effect on Ecology and Ecosystem in the South-West…*

Over the last 60 years, the land-use pattern of the coastal Bangladesh has changed repeatedly. In agricultural sector, rice was the main crop in the area, in the 1950s, [6]. However, rice production decreased regularly, because of tidal flooding and rising salinity [36]. With the help of the World Bank and other funding bodies, the Coastal Embankment Project was established between 1960 and 1980 to increase rice production in the coastal areas [37]. Regrettably, this project formed harmful impacts on the ecosystems of the area. Even though rice production increased immediately after the construction of embankments, the production had dropped another time by the 1990s. The major reason behind this decreased production was the congestion throughout the drainage system in the land area behind the embankments due to poor maintenance and inadequate management [38]. Consequently, the rice cultivators changed their livelihood to shrimp (black tiger) cultivation. This change of land-use again smashed the ecosystems of the area, as paddy fields and several parts of the mangrove forest were transformed to shrimp farm [39]. Therefore, the salinity of the area increased noticeably because of the enlarged shrimp cultivation. This change had an adverse effect on crop production as well as local vegetation, fish, and plant diversity over the last decade in the

Moreover, 30-year satellite data demonstrates that paddy field was the foremost category (37%) in the 1980s, which is continuously decreased to 9% in 2017. On the contrary, water bodies were the least dominant category in the 1980s (17%), but they constantly enlarged to be a dominant category in 2017 (34%) (**Figure 1**). There is another interesting finding from that research, where each of the LULC categories of 2017 was again split to perceive the land-use type in the 1980s. Thirty four percent of the water bodies in 2017 were water bodies in 1988, 26% water bodies of 2017 were directly transformed from paddy fields, and 40% were indirectly transformed through homestead gardens and settlements/bare land [31]. Therefore,

**7.2 How the LULC changes occurred in the coastal area of Bangladesh**

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.92806*

8.Tourism zone

*Frequent Change of Land-Use Pattern and Its Effect on Ecology and Ecosystem in the South-West… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.92806*
