Lena C. Grobusch

Nature-Based Solutions (NbS) have emerged as a cornerstone of sustainable urban and regional climate adaptation strategies […]

Investigating the historical patterns of urban growth and their drivers is crucial to informing sustainable urban planning policies, especially in cities of the Global South. In Vietnam, most studies focus primarily on city extents, offering little insight into urban growth across various provinces. This study, therefore, combined categorical land use and land cover change detection, Random Forest classification and expert interviews to quantify the urban growth between 2000 and 2020, assess urban encroachment upon other land uses, and identify key drivers shaping this growth in Thua Thien Hue province. Findings show that the urban land areas were 27.94 km², 82.97 km², and 209.80 km² in 2000, 2010, and 2020, respectively. Urban encroachment upon other land use types, especially cropland, barren land, rice paddies, shrubs, and forests, was observed in these periods. Additionally, accessibility to built-up areas, DEM, proximity to rice paddies, slope, proximity to street roads, accessibility to social areas, and proximity to cropland are the major spatial drivers of urban growth in the province. The study concludes that rapid urban expansion is evident in the province at the expense of other land use types, especially agricultural land use types, which may impact food security and livelihoods in the province.