Temporal Scaling of Landscape Processes in Informal Areas to Energy Poverty Mitigation

Abstract

Informal areas are constantly rising in many South African major cities and aimlessly propagating energy poverty situations and frustrating government efforts and current regulatory energy policies. Strategies to mitigate energy poverty situations are frequently limited due to a lack of geospatial knowledge pool or previous chronicles on accurate distributions and the subsequent states of affairs, especially when strategies are scarcely aligning with expected progress. This paper championed supervised (manual digitizing) classification analyses, using a single-date National Land Cover (NLC) data, derived from SPOT 5 imagery, and high-resolution aerial photographs in Land-Cover (LC) mapping and monitoring of informal areas in the City of Cape Town, in southwestern South Africa, over a two-time period (2010 - 2016). With the backup of multiple GIS techniques, valuable information from the data processing led to grander data assembly in analyzing LC conversions in informal areas. The resultant LC mapped at ~ 1448 ha in 2010 (in the D2 generated dataset -) was observed to drop to ~ 1356 ha in 2016 (in the D3 dataset). The resultant Land-Cover Change (LCC) of informal areas was mapped at 28% (in the DD5 dataset). The resultant LC conversions were analyzed using an indicator-based change detection approach in producing environmental (sustainability) assessment data through which mitigation strategies of energy poverty in informal areas can be refocused and regrounded in South Africa.