Are Neutrality Targets Alone Sufficient for Protecting Nature? Learning From Land Cover Change and Land Degradation Neutrality Targets in Mauritius

Abstract

ABSTRACTLand degradation contributes to loss of land productivity, climate change, and biodiversity loss worldwide, making the monitoring of land cover change a fundamental component of sustainable land use planning. To facilitate this task, international research organizations publish increasingly high‐quality global land cover data, yet those are still proving too imprecise at the scale of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) such as Mauritius. Though rapidly developing, Mauritius does not have a locally produced land cover map which is consistently updated and made available to the public in the scope of participatory planning processes. This study sought to bridge this gap by revising a 2010 land cover map of Mauritius island and producing a new map for 2020, which can serve as a basis for future updates through a consistent methodology that combines photointerpretation and semi‐automated classification from various datasets. These maps enabled the observation of key changes in the island's landscape, which are consistent with socio‐economic events, namely the decline of agricultural coverage (12.7%) due to the phasing out of preferential trade agreements for sugar, and the expansion of real estate (14.3% increase in built area) following new investment promotion policies. Considering the small size and high population density of the island, as is the case for SIDS, these developments and the Land Degradation Neutrality Targets of Mauritius bring the feasibility of area‐based land degradation neutrality into question and call for the analysis of land and ecosystem conditions through additional indicators.