Abstract
ABSTRACTAvoiding, reducing, and reversing land degradation and restoring degraded land is an urgent priority to protect the biodiversity and ecosystem services that are vital to life on Earth. To halt and reverse the current trends in land degradation, there is an immediate need to enhance national capacities to undertake quantitative assessments and mapping of their degraded lands, as required by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), in particular, the SDG indicator 15.3.1 (“proportion of land that is degraded over total land area”). Earth Observations (EO) can play an important role both for generating this indicator as well as complementing or enhancing national official data sources. Implementations like Trends.Earth to monitor land degradation in accordance with the SDG15.3.1 rely on default datasets of coarse spatial resolution provided by MODIS or AVHRR. Consequently, there is a need to develop methodologies to benefit from medium to high-resolution satellite EO data (e.g. Landsat or Sentinels). In response to this issue, this paper presents an initial overview of an innovative approach to monitor land degradation at the national scale in compliance with the SDG15.3.1 indicator using Landsat observations using a data cube but further work is required to improve the calculation of the three sub-indicators.
Highlights
According to the summary for policymakers of the thematic assessment report on land degradation and restoration of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), avoiding, reducing, and reversing land degradation and restoring degraded land is an urgent action to protect biodiversity and ecosystem services vital to all forms of life on our planet and to ensure human well-being (IPBES, 2018)
In response to this issue, this paper presents an initial overview of an innovative approach to monitor land degradation at the national scale in compliance with the SDG15.3.1 indicator using Landsat observations using a data cube but further work is required to improve the calculation of the three sub-indicators
The Trends.Earth model used to compute the SDG15.3.1 indicator is available on the Virtual Laboratory (VLab) after registration
Summary
According to the summary for policymakers of the thematic assessment report on land degradation and restoration of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), avoiding, reducing, and reversing land degradation and restoring degraded land is an urgent action to protect biodiversity and ecosystem services vital to all forms of life on our planet and to ensure human well-being (IPBES, 2018). Degradation of land through human activities is undermining the wellbeing of at least 3.2 billion people, pushing the planet towards a sixth mass extinction and costing more than 10 per cent of total Gross Domestic Product (GDP) (IPBES, 2018). The main drivers of land degradation are the high consumption lifestyles of the most developed economies, and the rising consumption in developing and emerging economies. Timely action to avoid, reduce, and reverse land degradation can increase food and water security, can contribute substantially to the adaptation and mitigation of climate change and biodiversity loss, could reduce conflict and migration; and is essential for meeting many of the Sustainable Development Goals defined in the Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development (IPBES, 2018; United Nations, 2015)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
