Solomon Benti Abuna

• Land use and food security
• Environmental and climate change
• Health and sanitation
• Ecosystem services
• Sustainable use of natural resources
• Environmental Impact Analysis
• Urbanisation
• Agriculture, land use, climate change
• Migration, mobility and urbanization

• Ethiopia

Project Abstract

Human beings highly interact with nature to fulfill their needs. Interacting with nature is widely recognized in providing many health and well-being such as psychological, the social and spiritual benefits to us. For instance, ecosystems provide food, wood, wool and medicines, and regulate the environments in which we live.

Even though human beings depend on nature for its survival, most urbanites are unaware of the connection between their livelihood, quality of life, and their dependence on the processes and cycles of the natural world. In urban areas, the pristine nature has been replaced by anthropogenic elements and urban areas are becoming the centers of major environmental problems and degradation of natural resources. Over the last couple of decades, urban expansion in the developing countries, specifically in the global south, has been increasing rapidly and it induces natural landscape changes, becoming the causes of the diminishing agriculture and arable lands, and mismanagement of available water resources.

Particularly in Ethiopia, urban development use to be extremely slow and even sporadic, but in the last 10 years, Ethiopia became among the world’s fastest urbanizing countries, and its urban expansion are mostly at expenses of both the natural and agricultural areas. For instance, the Addis Ababa city has been expanding to the nearby satellite towns and leads to losses in the potential of food production of the neighboring towns, formerly dedicated to farming, as occurred in Addis Ababa.

Although the care on the urban-related environment in Ethiopia is growing in importance, very few researches have been done so far. Most of precedent studies underlined the impacts of natural and agricultural landscapes due to the expansion of urban areas, but few have stated the challenges for the landscapes depletion and proposed ways to integrate them in the urban planning process of the country. Moreover, no guidelines exist that were built upon the socio-ecological criteria. We argue that doing so would be a step ahead to operationalize a more sustainable urban development planning. Therefore, this research is basically focus on the exploration of the main challenges in the integration of the natural and working landscape attributes in the Ethiopian urban planning process, and will contribute a socio-ecological based urban planning methodology particularly applicable for the emerging urban areas in the country.

Lecturer at Addis Ababa University; Ethiopian institute of Architecture, Building Construction and City Development (EiABC)

Urban and Regional Planning

Environmental Planning and Management

Landcape Planning and Design

Bsc. Degree in Urban and Regional Planning from Addis Ababa University, Technology faculty(south)

M.Sc degree in Environmental Planning and Landscape Design from Addis Ababa University, EiABC

A PhD student at ZEF

Urban Environment

The Germany Academic Exchange Services (DAAD)

Ethiopian Ministry of Education

Addis Ababa University, EiABC

Prof. Dr. Christian Borgemeister, ZEF

Dr. Daniel Callo-Concha; ZEF

Dr. Heyaw Terefe; Addis Ababa University, EiABC