Environmental issues involve a variety of underlying, interwoven factors.Geographical Information Systems (GIS) can be effectively utilized, both inanalyzing such factors and in organizing environmental preservation programs.This study aims to investigate, by utilizing GIS, the relationship between humanactivities and desertification in a semi-aridarea, based on which to proposefeasible measures toward sustainable aguriculture. An equation to compute theamount of soil loss was formulated from field data collected in Makutapora, andinput data to GIS are produced by digitizing existing materials available for thesurvey area, such as topographic maps and multispectral image data. The equationand data are then combined to GIS, in order to identify causal factors and assessthe areal distribution of soil losses