Identifying Suitable Settlement Areas In Minjar Shenkora Woreda, Ethiopia

Abstract

Due to the increase in the number of populations, immigration of people from the rural areas to towns are increasing year to year in Minjar Shenkora Woreda. This makes the increasing of a house demands in the urban settlement. Consequently, Arerty and Balchi towns including the newly emerged towns are expanding in every direction rapidly with the deterioration of prime agricultural land and causes different conflicts with government such as social, economic and political instability. Besides, poor dispersed settlements in rural areas are difficult to expand infrastructure with minimum cost. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to identify suitable settlement areas in Minjar Shenkora Wereda in terms of 10 criteria such as prime agricultural land, slope, soil types, soil depth, underground water, geology, land use land cover, distance from roads, distances from towns and distance from rivers/drainage so as to identify sustainable settlement areas. Two approaches: the combination of geographic information systems (GIS) and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) which is one of the multi-criteria decision-making methods to identify the settlement areas have been used. As a result, of all 1587 square kilometers of the Woreda, 234km2 (14.6%) of the area is found to be most suitable, 1303km2 (82%) is moderately suitable, 43km2 (3%) is less suitable and 7 km2 (0.4%) is not suitable for settlement at all. Lastly, 166.88 km2 are prime agricultural land that had to be conserved & used wisely. Finally, the study recommended that before planning new settlement, land suitability analysis should be done to develop sustainable settlement environment.