Abstract:
Tourism industry is one of the main economic activities of the southern coastal
belt of Sri Lanka and is closely related to land use as it dramatically transforms
the natural land into highly artificial ones. The main focus of this study was to
carry out a detailed analysis of the spatial and temporal contrasts of land-use
patterns in Hikkaduwa and Bentota tourist sites and to study the environmental
problems that arose from it. Both primary and secondary data were used for this
purpose and land use analysis of the two sites during the period 1972-2022 was
done using the digitizing tool of Arc GIS 10.8.2 software. The mixed land use
diversity of the two sites was calculated using the entropy value (H) using the
land extents calculated by the geometric calculator. According to the map
analysis, during the period between 1972-2022, coconut plantation lands in
Hikkaduwa have been reduced by 22.54%, rice cultivation lands by 8.27%, and
mixed vegetation lands by 2.21%, while in Bentota, coconut, rice and mixed
vegetation lands have reduced by 15.28%, 16.5% and 1.16% respectively. A
growth of 30.41% and 22.03% of built land in Hikkaduwa and Bentota
respectively can be identified during the same period. By H calculations it was
possible to identify a transformation of land use in Hikkaduwa area from
proportional mixed land use (0.8405 in 1972) to single dominant land use type
(0.6974 in 2022). The H of 0.740 (in 1972) and 0.729 (in 2022) revealed that the
proportion of the major land-uses is becoming equal in Bentota. It was possible
to identify that the amount and severity of environmental problems based on
tourism land-use is relatively high in Hikkaduwa. The study concluded that the
tourism industry associated with informal land use in Hikkaduwa has failed in
terms of environmental sustainability.
