ABSTRACT
The Ashanti region in Ghana, abundant in natural resources such as forests and vegetation biomes, significantly supports the livelihoods of a significant portion of the population. The sustainable management of forest resources remains a significant challenge to achieving environmental and economic growth and poverty alleviation. The study aims to identify the drivers of deforestation and assess its impact on the livelihoods of the poor and vulnerable communities in the Ashanti region. The study utilized qualitative and space-based data to examine the patterns of vegetation cover and deforestation from 2000 to 2020. The results revealed moderate to sparse vegetation in Ashanti from 2002, 2005, 2011, 2015, 2017, and 2018, with no vegetation in the northcentral part, attributed to climate change, agricultural practices, government policies, and deforestation-related disasters. The study found a significant correlation (R² = 0.8197) between years and deforestation areas, especially in 2018 at around 16,000 Sqkm, indicating an exponential increase with severe implications for sustainable livelihoods. Much of these changes were reflected in 2020 with a high peak of deforestation towards the southeastern parts of the region. Additionally, the results show that the poor groups are not passive actors but are actively involved in identifying systems and processes through which to build their adaptive capacity and resilience to environmental and climate change-induced changes. The findings provide evidence-based and all-inclusive approaches that would encourage vulnerable and marginalized groups to participate in the co-production and co-creation of policies and strategies. This outcome is geared towards transformative and sustainable communities while ensuring efficient and effective response and recovery capacities of deforested lands.
ABSTRACT
Global assessment of vegetation response to climate change (VRCC) studies was conducted to reveal the research evolution, current research hotspots and better understanding of dominant themes in VRCC areas of research from 1992 to 2019 through the use of bibliometrics. A total of 186 articles with the search term "Vegetation response to Climate change" were retrieved using the Web of Science (WOS) database. The annual growth rate of 10.3% connotes that research on VRCC has been increasing over time during the survey period. Average citations per article experienced many fluctuations over the years rather than maintaining the same growth rate, which connotes that this field of research reached was unstable in terms of average total citation per document. Results show that China ranked first followed by the USA and the UK, and this shows the dominance of these countries on VRCC studies over the years in review. Results from corresponding authors' nationalities show that multiple-country publications are relatively low compared to articles from single-country publications which showed a dominant trend. Hence, we can infer that most studies on VRCC were sustained by single-country publications. Results from this study revealed top-cited articles, the top global distribution of documents, academic collaboration, most relevant keywords and Word TreeMap of high-frequency keywords. The findings of this study show that "temperature" is in a central position in all keywords with the largest significant appearance in the field. In conclusion, the findings from this study may be applicable for planning and managing vegetation and forest ecosystem research and provide hints for future development.