摘要：Climate change is directly related to our livelihoods and needs to be studied in order to form mitigation and adaptation policies.Climate change is a global phenomenon and poses diverse implications in form and type for different ecologies.Human activities are greatly disturbing the nature through using the land for different types of anthropogenic activities like cultural,financial matters,environmental aspects,land policy and land development plans.The present study aims to analyze the climatic variation and assess the land use change of district Bahawalpur having total area of 24,830 km2.Climatic data (minimum temperature,maximum temperature and rainfall) were collected for a period of 30 years (1989-2018).Monthly mean minimum and maximum temperature,annual rainfall,Diurnal Temperature Range (DTR) and their anomalies were calculated using secondary data for the study area.Land use data were collected in the form of Landsat satellite images of last 30 years (1990-2019) with 10 yeas interval from different online sources.Landsat ETM and ETM + satellite imagery were processed in ArcGIS software.Results showed that there is a great variation in maximum temperature anomaly during the entire study period.Minimum temperature anomaly shows positive and negative trend during the entire study period from 1989 to 2019.There is a great variation in DTR anomaly during the study period.10-years moving average of DTR anomaly remained positive during most of the time.There is variation in annual rainfall anomaly,with both positive and negative values.As in the whole time span of 30 years,built-up land increased from 2.54% (631 Km2) in 1990 to 4.66% (1,157 Km2) at the end of 2019.Agricultural land use also increased from 3,439 Km2 (13.85%) to 5,168 Km2 (20.81%).Forest land use decreased from the 1,321 Km2 (5.32%) to 775 Km2 (3.12%) at end of 2019.Water occupied land with the high fluctuation was 109 Km2 (0.44%) in 1990 and in 2019 it recorded 148 Km2 (0.60%).The main land use class desert land also decreased from an area of 19,330 Km2 (77.85%) to 17,582 Km2 (70.81%).Correlation of land use change classes in last 30 years showed relationship intensity between different land use changes.Agricultural land and built up land have strong relationship with the value of 0.98.Desert land and agricultural land have strongly negative relationship with the value of -0.94.This study found how rapidly changes occurred in the land use with rate of land use change is a mile stone for the planners,researchers and scholars for the better understanding towards land use change in district Bahawalpur.
