Evaluation of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 15.3.1 indicator of land degradation in the European Union

The Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Life on Land aims to achieve Land Degradation Neutrality by 2030 while promoting land restoration. The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) has defined an indicator framework to monitor progress towards this goal. Here, we evaluated the performance of the SDG 15.3.1 indicator under the UNCCD methodology for the European Union (EU) using the Trends.Earth software. We assessed the impact of alternative higher resolution data sources for land cover (CORINE) and soil organic carbon stock (LUCAS SOC). Our hypothesis was that higher spatial resolution sub-indicators would provide a better identification of the total share of degraded land, and a greater agreement of the extent of degraded land for the target period. The UNCCD methodology underestimates land degradation. Due to its high dependence on the land productivity, which drives the assessment of land degradation by more than 80% compared to land cover change and SOC stock sub-indicators combined. Replacing the original UNCCD sub-indicators with higher resolution data sources improved the assessment and allowed us to detect +25-40 % degraded areas. Despite the improvement in estimating land degradation by using sub-indicators with higher spatial resolution, the methodology can benefit from the integration of data which allow the characterization of extreme degradation features.These new factors identified an additional 50% of the EU as degraded.

SCHILLACI Calogero;  JONES Arwyn;  SIMOES VIEIRA Diana;  MUNAFÒ Michele;  MONTANARELLA Luca; 

2023-01-16

WILEY

JRC128477

1085-3278 (online),   

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ldr.4457,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC128477,   

10.1002/ldr.4457 (online),