Rapid urban expansion and development have resulted in the conversion of many natural green surfaces within cities to non-transpiring built-up surfaces, such as concrete and asphalt. These artificial urban surfaces cause substantial variation in land surface temperatures that affect the urban microclimate. Thus, there is the need to substantially quantify the extent of green cover loss within growing cities and its impact on surface temperatures. This study used LANDSAT data to spatially assess the extent of urban expansion and its effect on land surface temperature within Kumasi, Ghana. Subsequently, the results showed significant changes in the land cover, which had an effect on the observed land surface temperatures from 1986 to 2015. Generally, there was an overall increase in the built-up areas by 24.13% (55.81 km 2 ) from 1986 to 2015, with a corresponding increase in the mean land surface temperature by 4.16°C. As such, there is the need for the adoption of sustainable urban planning strategies with green vegetation conservation initiatives for modern city planners. This would help reduce urban land surface temperatures while promoting clean air circulation within the city.
Globally, forests provide several functions and services to support humans’ well-being and the mitigation of greenhouse gases (GHGs). The services that forests provide enable the forest-dependent people and communities to meet their livelihood needs and well-being. Nevertheless, the world’s forests face a twin environmental problem of deforestation and forest degradation (D&FD), resulting in ubiquitous depletion of forest biodiversity and ecosystem services and eventual loss of forest cover. Ghana, like any tropical forest developing country, is not immune to these human-caused D&FD. This paper reviews Ghana’s D&FD driven by a plethora of pressures, despite many forest policies and interventions to ensure sustainable management and forest use. The review is important as Ghana is experiencing an annual D&FD rate of 2%, equivalent to 135,000 hectares loss of forest cover. Although some studies have focused on the causes of D&FD on Ghana’ forests, they failed to show the chain of causal links of drivers that cause D&FD. This review fills the knowledge and practice gap by adopting the Driver-Pressures-State-Impacts-Responses (DPSIR) analytical framework to analyse the literature-based sources of causes D&FD in Ghana. Specifically, the analysis identified agriculture expansion, cocoa farming expansion, illegal logging, illegal mining, population growth and policy failures and lapses as the key drivers of Ghana’s D&FD. The study uses the DPSIR analytical framework to show the chain of causal links that lead to the country’s D&FD and highlights the numerous interventions required to reverse and halt the ubiquitous perpetual trend of D&FD in Ghana. Similar tropical forest countries experiencing D&FD will find the review most useful to curtail the menace.
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