Geospatial information for sustainable food systems

Monitoring ecosystem degradation and restoration using satellite Earth observations to support the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): The example of module 15.3.1 on SEPAL

24/05/2022 - 24/05/2022

Human use of natural resources has not yet reached its peak, but everything points to a slowdown in the growth of agricultural productivity, a rapid depletion of ecosystem productive capacity and generation of environmental damage. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) target 15.3 aims at protecting and restoring the territorial ecosystem to achieve a land degradation-neutral world by 2030. The indicator 15.3.1 (proportion of degraded land over total land area) has three sub-indicators: i) productivity, ii) land cover, iii) soil organic carbon. Earth observation datasets are the primary sources of data for deriving these sub-indicators. It requires selecting, querying and processing a substantial historical archive of data to derive the information for this indicator. To remove the complexities from this end, a module on the SEPAL platform (https://sepal.io) has been developed in compliance with the UNCCD Good Practice Guidance (GPG v2) to derive all the necessary statistics and maps for reporting by the relevant stakeholders.