SPEAKERS:

• Sasha Alexander (Policy Officer at UNCCD)
• Alexander Zvoleff (Senior Director of Resilience Science Conservation International)
• Neil Sims (CSIRO and Co-Chair of Working Group 3 of the Geo land Degradation Neutrality Initiative)

Other individuals involved (not presenting)

• Ante Hecheltjen (Co-Chair Working Group 2 – Germany)
• Amos Kabobah (Co Chair of Working Group 1 - Ghana)

SUMMARY:

The GEO Land Degradation Neutrality Initiative (GEO LDN) was created to support countries and other stakeholders in addressing land degradation. It supports capacity, building, standards development, and data analytics, including supporting efforts to measure the condition of land and the three indicators for SDG 15.3.1:

• Trends in land cover,
• trends in land productivity, and
• trends in carbon stocks above and below grounds.

The GEO LDN Initiative will use data (from Earth Observation) to track progress in implementing the UNCCD 2018-30 Strategic Framework, monitoring progress towards LDN and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (particularly SDG indicator 15.3.1).

The Geo LDN Initiative has three working groups:

1. WG1: Builds capacity at national levels
2. WG2: develops and reviews existing standards, minimum data quality standard specifications, technical support for setting quality standards and revises good practice guidelines for data.
3. WG3: establishes a collaborative platform and pilots big data analytics.

As noted by Alex, GEO LDN and tools like Trends.Earth help to democratize access to information, by making satellite-based estimates of change in indicators of land degradation available to those who may have limited expertise in remote sensing. Neil noted it is difficult to get data sets connected and GEO LDN is helping countries by facilitating these connections.  Countries should feel ownership over the SDGSs, and the LDN Initiative supports countries in integrating their own datasets and methodologies while still allowing for assessment of LDN in a standardized way. A future interest of the GEO LDN Initiative is to support using data and data models to help predict areas where land degradation might occur.

Neil noted countries must be able to use their own approaches and local knowledge to identify if an area is degraded but it is necessary to have a framework for a consistent approach.  Neil presented a decision support matrix to help countries interpret the degradation status of areas where remediation activities and the 1OAO framework might lead to counterintuitive degradation outcomes.  This will help countries take the best course of action to neutralize land degradation.