Assessing the extent of land degradation in the eThekwini municipality using land cover change and soil organic carbon

More than 75% of the global land has already suffered degradation, leading to the recognition of land degradation as one of the foremost challenges society faces. This recognition stems from its profound adverse impacts on natural ecosystem functioning, biodiversity, soil productivity, and food availability. Consequently, understanding the spatial distribution of land degradation across all scales becomes imperative. This study employed land cover change and soil organic carbon (SOC) stock assessments to analyse land degradation within the eThekwini Municipality beyond the baseline period (2000–2015). Utilizing remote sensing and machine learning techniques, this research examined land degradation within the eThekwini Municipality over the period spanning 2000 to 2022. Landsat 7 (Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus – ETM+), Landsat 8 (Operational Land Imager 1 - OLI1), and Landsat 9 (Operational Land Imager 2 - OLI2) images were employed to extract variables for both land cover change and SOC stock prediction through XGBoost, LightGBM, Random Forest (RF), and Support Vector Machine (SVM) models. Among these models, LightGBM demonstrates superior performance, achieving an overall accuracy of 80.646 in land cover predictions and 77.869 in SOC stock predictions. Analysis of land cover change within the eThekwini Municipality unveiled a shift from forests and shrubland landscapes to cropland and built-up areas. This shift results in the municipality encountering losses in SOC stock between 2015 and 2022. The model predicted that most SOC stock losses occur at the 20–50 cm depth (9.27%), in comparison to the 7.21% loss at the 0–20 cm depth. These findings underscore the pivotal role of remote sensing and machine learning in aiding policymakers to assess land degradation and implement pertinent measures to enhance the landscape.