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Lack of environmental awareness is one of the underlying causes of severe environmental degradation in Ethiopia. As teachers' colleges are a seedbed of such awareness, assessment of college curricula should shed light on the possibilities they offer to develop capacities to address environmental degradation. This small-scale study is based on the assessment of the curricula of the Kotebe and St Mary's teachers' colleges, Ethiopia, and the knowledge and opinions of a sample of teaching students on pertinent environmental issues facing the country. Comparative analysis of data generated through questionnaires and interviews was undertaken across college, curricula and gender categories. The results suggest: a 'paradigm shift' from a core-focused to a pedagogical-focused curriculum in the last three decades; a declining trend in the provision of outdoor environmental education; inadequate levels of factual knowledge amongst current college students; and variations in knowledge levels and attitudes among the respondents taking different curricula. If the work of teachers' colleges is to support wider efforts throughout Ethiopia to address the causes and effects of environmental degradation, the findings of the study underscore the necessity of revisiting the composition of course categories and maintaining the existence of outdoor environmental education in the current college curricula.

To monitor land-use/land-cover (LULC) change and assess its impact on the soil property, the availability of benchmark data is indispensable, which is hardly available in the intensively cultivated regions of developing countries. Our study attempts to solve this problem by generating a benchmark soil data through the development of modified spatial analogue (MSA) method in the context of the Upper Dijo River catchment, south-central Ethiopia. The magnitude and patterns of LULC changes were extracted from air photos and satellite imageries, along with the acquisition of soil samples from the reference and target sites through ground survey. Analysis of digital image processing shows significant LULC changes in a period that spanned three decades. The impact of LULC change on soil quality was assessed by comparing the soil physico-chemical properties sampled from the reference and target sites. The result shows a decline in total nitrogen, organic matter, available potassium and pH levels in soils collected from target sites, which conforms to results reported by studies conducted in data-rich environment. With careful validation, MSA could be useful for monitoring soil property changes in data-scarce environment and generate soil-related parameters for agro-ecological models.

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