A working group pooling members of the international scientific community and civil society was formed in 2008 as a French initiative. It aims to address the imperatives outlined in the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification: developing a minimum set of indicators to help policy makers assess desertification and land degradation trends on different scales and also to implement the Strategic Objectives. This will ultimately lead to the development of a series of simple indicators, while specifying all aspects to facilitate their use: from the method to the availability of primary data, in addition to their feasibility and associated costs.