Identifying and Quantifying Urban Sprawl in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana from 1985 to 2014

Urban sprawl has become one of the major threats to sustainable development of our time. This not withstanding is not given the needed attention by authorities to curb this menace. It is against this backdrop that this study was carried out. Changes in the land cover between the period of 1985 and 2014 in the Greater Accra Region were considered and how the urban lands changed during that period, using geospatial techniques. The built–up areas were obtained from the Landsat classified images of two different years to monitor the dynamics of urban sprawl. Land use/cover change analysis coupled with Shannon’s entropy index was employed to identify and quantify the changes in the urban growth pattern in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana. The results showed both the non-urban and water lands are decreasing at an annual rate of 0.38% and 0.23% respectively while the urban lands keep increasing annually at 7.8%. The Shannon’s entropy values for the area ranged from 0.4019 to 0.9199 in 1985 and 0.8162 to 0.9923 in 2014. These figures showed that the rate of sprawl was more pronounced in 2014 than in 1985.