Abstract:
Climate change and soil erosion are major environmental challenge in the world,
which affects societies at whole. The objective of the study was to assess the status of
climate change, impact of future change in climate variables on the soil erosion, to
provide valuable insight to decision makers on the local vulnerability of the Rib
watershed basin area with the RUSLE and SDSM 4.2 model. Satellite remotely
sensed data and other ancillary data were used. Software such as ArcGIS 10.4.1
and remote sensing techniques were used. The result of RUSLE model shows that
the potential average annual soil loss of the watershed ranges from 0 to 95.05
t/ha/year with a mean annual soil loss of 35.62 ton/ha/year in the year 2008 and 40.91
t/ha/year in the year 2018. Soil erosion is one of the major hazards affected by the
climate change, particularly the increasing intensity of rainfall resulted in increasing
erosion, apart from other factors like land use change. Changes in climate have an
adverse effect with increasing rainfall. It has caused increasing concern for modeling
the future rainfall and projecting future soil erosion. In the present study, future rainfall
has been generated with the downscaling of GCM (Global Circulation Model) data of
in rib watershed in the Abay basin, north-western highland of Ethiopia, to obtain future
impact on soil erosion within the basin. Statistical Downscaling Model (SDSM 4.2) was
used to downscale large scale predictors into finer scale resolution. Climate change
scenarios of precipitation, maximum and minimum temperature were divided into four
time windows of 25 years each from 2001- 2099. The period from 1989-2003 were
taken as a base period. To recommend a certain finding there should be a result of
riptide compiled research. So it is better that other researcher to conduct further tests
of such experiment at this area. But until the experiments being conducted, since this
finding was synchrony with other several researches conducted in similar
environmental conditions and the result of this finding is the best. However, this needs
to be verified with multi-year research.
Keywords: ArcGIS, LULC, Soil erosion, Climate Change, SDSM (Statistical downscaling model)
, RUSLE (Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation)