ASSESSING THE NEGATIVE IMPACTS OF BUILDING CONSTRUCTION ACTIVITIES ON VEGETATION IN ZOMBA CITY, SOUTHERN REGION, MALAWI

The building construction industry is well known as a source of negative environmental impacts, which are associated with production and extraction of raw materials. Some of the major impacts caused by the industry are deforestation, degradation of urban landscape, ecosystem destruction, resource depletion, land pollution, air pollution, natural disaster, effect on biodiversity and noise pollution amongst others. Therefore, the study is mainly focusing on identifying the major negative impacts of various building construction activities on vegetation. However, ways of minimizing the negative impacts of building construction activities on vegetation should be applied and followed. The collected data was analyzed using ArcGIS, Qgis, and ENV softwares to interpret and further analyze the Landsat satellite images. Supervised Image classification analysis was also employed to generate Landcover maps, NDVI, and NDBI maps. However general guidelines on the selection for the most appropriate methodology in relation to the research aims and objectives may also be proposed.