Land use and land cover are essential for maintaining and managing the natural resources on the earth surface. A complex set of economic, demographic, social, cultural, technological, and environmental processes usually result in the change in the land use/land cover change (LULC). Pokhara Metropolitan is influenced mainly by the combination of various driving forces: geographical location, high rate of population growth, economic opportunity, globalization, tourism activities, and political activities. In addition to this, geographically steep slope, rugged terrain, and fragile geomorphic conditions and the frequency of earthquakes, floods, and landslides make the Pokhara Metropolitan region a disaster-prone area. The increment of the population along with infrastructure development of a given territory leads towards the urbanization. It has been rapidly changing due to urbanization, industrialization and internal migration since the 1970s. The landscapes and ground patterns are frequently changing on time and prone to disaster. Here a study has been carried to study on LULC for the last 18 years (2000-2018). The supervised classification on Landsat Imagery was performed and verified the classification through computing the error matrix. Besides, the water bodies and vegetation area were extracted through the Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDWI) respectively. This research shows that during the last 18 years the agricultural areas diminishing by 15.66% while urban area is increasing by 13.2%. This research is beneficial for preparing the plan and policy in the sustainable development of Pokhara Metropolitan.

A combination of rough topography, steep slopes, active tectonic and seismic process and intense impact of monsoon rain has made the fragile environment of Nepal vulnerable to a variety of natural hazards. Most frequent hazards are floods, landslides, epidemics, fires, earthquake and other hydro-meteorological disasters, causing heavy loss of human lives as well as economic loss including housing and infrastructures (MDRIP, 2009). Hence, hazard assessments are the need of the hour. They help district and regional decision makers, policy makers and development agencies prepare disaster risk reduction plans. The chosen study area was Banepa and Panauti municipality. Separate hazard assessments have been performed for four hazards, namely, earthquake, flood, landslide and industrial hazards.Earthquake hazard zone maps have been made following the Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Assessment (PSHA) approach for 500 year return period to produce seismic intensity distribution maps in the form of Modified Mercalli Intensity (MMI) maps using Trifunac and Brady formula. Flood inundation maps have been made using HEC-RAS and HEC-GeoRAS extension for ArcGIS for return periods of 2, 10 and 500 of Chandeswori and Punyamata rivers. Landslide hazard susceptibility map has been made using the Stability Index Mapping (SINMAP) extension for ArcGIS that uses an infinite-slope equation accurate for debris flows. Industrial hazard maps that depict the vicinity that falls within various ranges of danger in the event of different industrial hazards like fire, Vapor Cloud Explosion (VCE) and Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor Explosion (BLEVE) have been prepared as well. Finally, a composite multi hazard map has been prepared by combining all the four hazards.Nepalese Journal on Geoinformatics -13, 2014, Page: 25-31

Accurate and the efficient rapid mapping of the fire-damaged areas are the most fundamental things for any places to retain from environmental loss. To support the fire management, make definite strategy and planning, and restore the vegetation, it is important to detect the area before and after the fire damages. Under climate change conditions, heat and drought may trigger tough fire regimes in terms of number and dimension of fires. To deliver the rapid information of the area damaged by the fires, Burned Area Index (BAI), Normalized Burned Ratio (NBR) and their versions are applied to map burned areas from high-resolution optical satellite data. The new MSI sensor aboard Sentinel-2 satellites records the more spectral information in the red edge spectral region making it more convenient to the development of new indices for the burned area mapping. Recently, Australia had confronted a devastating bushfire recorded in the history of the nation. In this project, NBR deployed to detect burned areas at around 10m-20m spatial resolution based on pre and post-fire Sentinel-2 images. A dNBR (differentiated Normalized Burned Ratio) was calculated while burn severity was mapped as purposed by United States Geological Survey (USGS). It observed that more than half of the East Gippsland region i.e. about 53% of the area affected by the wildfire while 38% remained unburned and 8.4% showed the regrowth.