Social-Ecological Systems in Transition: Understanding the Dynamics of the Konso Cultural Landscape UNESCO World Heritage Site, Ethiopia

Cultural landscapes are inherently dynamic, shaped by the continuous interplay between multiple factors. Understanding their dynamics through remote sensing-based technologies and landscape metrics is essential for generating empirical evidence needed to inform effective heritage conservation decisions. Drawing on an integrated methodological framework that combines human geography, remote sensing, GIS, and landscape ecology, our study critically investigates how the interplay between ecological, sociocultural, and institutional variables shapes cultural landscape transformation. Our results indicate a rapid and profound transformation of the Konso cultural landscape over the last five decades (1976–2023), resulting from the convergence of rapid population growth, state ideology, poor governance, and changing aspirations of the community. While forests and bush/shrub land have experienced a significant decline and fragmentation, settlement and agricultural land demonstrated a substantial increase. Beyond spatial expansion, a fundamental shift in settlement morphology was observed, with compact and defensively oriented morphology giving way to more dispersed, linear, and loosely structured settlement pattern. Our study concludes that the challenges facing the Konos cultural landscape are not only environmental and socioeconomic but also existential—a value-based negotiation where the community must find an alternative pathway, a pathway that allows for the people to fulfill their desire for development without entirely sacrificing their cultural identity and socioecological wisdom that are the source of their uniqueness.