Investigation of the drivers and impacts of agricultural expansions on the Kafue River basin in Zambia’s Copperbelt Province and their implications on environmental and social sustainability

Agriculture remains a single largest contributor to deforestation and overall environmental damage in Sub Saharan Africa including Zambia. Subsistence agriculture along the Kafue River Basin in Zambia’s Copperbelt province is more pronounced now than before. Despite the significant role that the Kafue River basin plays in sustaining Zambian’s economic system, little information is known on the socio-economic effects on riverbank cultivation on communities residing between Kitwe and Chingola in the Copperbelt Province. To address the information gap, this study will be conducted purposely to investigate: the extent to which climate change is driving riverbank cultivation in the Kafue River Basin, what long-term spatiotemporal landscape changes that have occurred overtime on the Kafue River basin, which model of agricultural production system would promote environmental sustainability along river banks; what are the environmental effects of river bank cultivation. The root cause of this problem emanates from the time Government of Zambia (GRZ) began privatisation of the mining sector in 1990 resulting in many Zambians losing employment opportunities, compromising their means of survival living them with limited income opportunities. This forced them to engage in unsustainable agricultural activities encroaching into the Kafue River Basin using fertilisers and pesticides as a way to boost their agricultural productivity. Rural communities also hold vasts of indigenous knowledge which ensures for their sustainability which when combined with local knowledge, cutting edge-science and technology in agricultural production increases food security thus sustaining livelihoods. Agricultural expansions that occur over a long time can be monitored using remote sensing (RS) which provides detailed information on land use (LU) and land change (LC) and corresponding changes. Triangulating geographic information systems (GIS) and RS techniques can be combined to analyse spatiotemporal landscape change dynamics.