Land Use and Land Cover Change Analysis Following the 2025 Myanmar Earthquake Shindai Kanai (a*), Rin Owa (a), Ye Htet (b), Osamu Kozan (b)
a) Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies, Kyoto University, Japan
b) Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University, Japan
Abstract
On March 28, 2025, a magnitude 7.7 earthquake struck central Myanmar followed by another magnitude 6.4 one. Amid an ongoing civil war between the military regime and pro-democracy forces since the 2021 coup in this Southeast Asian country, the disaster further deepened the crisis for already vulnerable communities. Over 3,400 fatalities and the destruction or damage of more than 40,000 buildings have been reported, but the full extent of the damage remains unclear. This study aims to provide a comprehensive damage assessment of the affected areas through remote sensing-based land use and land cover (LULC) mapping. While satellite-based damage assessments are gaining attention in post-disaster contexts, most existing efforts focused on accessible regions or were conducted under government direction. In contrast, there are few cases of LULC mapping in armed-conflict zones like Myanmar, where reliable information is scarce. This study seeks to visualize on-the-ground realities from a civilian-centered perspective by leveraging open-access satellite data. We used high-resolution satellite imagery from Google Earth and geotagged social media posts related to the earthquake to generate training data for supervised classification. By employing both optical and synthetic aperture radar imagery from Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 satellites, two LULC maps were produced: one covering the period from March to July 2024 (pre-earthquake) and another from March to July 2025 (post-earthquake). Classification was conducted using the Random Forest algorithm, targeting major land cover categories including built-up areas, forests, croplands, and water bodies. By visualizing LULC changes triggered by the earthquake, this research aims to contribute to understanding the large coverage area of the impact and highlight the utility of remote sensing as a reactive tool in data scarce and politically sensitive contexts.
Keywords: LULC, Earthquake Damage Assessment, Southeast Asian Area Studies
