Comprehensive urban environment quality assessment using remote sensing satellite data for Bhopal city, India

KEYWORDS: Urbanisation, Remote sensing, Comprehensive environmental quality, Bhopal, India

ABSTRACT

A tremendous increase in the global human population has become a major threat to the environment mainly these situations are existing in developing nations. A higher population poses higher demands as well as pressure on the environment directly or indirectly, which is an issue for the sustainable development of the country. Most of the Indian cities are facing challenges in environmental sustainability. Bhopal the capital city of Madhya Pradesh, India is presently going through rapid urbanization and industrialization which leads to environmental degradation of the city. The study aims at analyzing the environmental sustainability of the city. The study is performed using satellite-based remote sensing data integrated with the census data. Initially, Landsat TM satellite data of the years 2001 and 2011 are utilized for extracting the land use land cover (LULC) transformations. Further, MODIS data products at 1 km resolution are used for estimating the biophysical indicators (BI) which are normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and land surface temperature (LST). A comprehensive environmental quality index (CEQI) is obtained by integrating BI with census data and transformations in CEQI are studied for the urban environment. The results depicted an increase in urban built-up with a phenomenal decay in the greenness of the city. The results from CEQI reveals significant changes in the different zones of the city which are highly affected due to change in urbanization and greenness pattern of the city. The study highlights the critical zones of the city and suggests measures to improve the environmental quality for the critical zones which can help the policy-makers in sustainable planning of the city.