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The purpose of this indicator is to provide good coverage of land-based natural capital and ecosystem services; accurate picture of land degradation.

SDG indicator 15.3.1 is a binary quantification based on the analysis of available data for three sub-indicators to be validated and reported by national authorities. The sub-indicators (Trends in Land Cover, Land Productivity and Carbon Stocks) were adopted by the UNCCD’s governing body in 2013 as part of its monitoring and evaluation approach.

Three sub-indicators

Land degradation is defined as the reduction or loss of the biological or economic productivity and complexity of rain fed cropland, irrigated cropland, or range, pasture, forest and woodlands resulting from a combination of pressures, including land use and management practices. This definition was adopted by and is used by the 196 countries that are Party to the UNCCD.

Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) is defined as a state whereby the amount and quality of land resources necessary to support ecosystem functions and services and enhance food security remain stable or increase within specified temporal and spatial scales and ecosystems.

Total land area is the total surface area of a country excluding the area covered by inland waters, like major rivers and lakes.

Forest Department

Forest Department

Annual

Spatial extent (hectares or km²) expressed as the proportion (percentage or %) of land that is degraded over total land area.

The assessment and quantification of land degradation is generally regarded as context-specific, making it difficult for a single indicator to fully capture the state or condition of the land. While necessary but not sufficient, the sub-indicators address changes in different yet highly relevant ways: for example, land cover or productivity trends can capture relatively fast changes while changes in carbon stocks reflect slower changes that suggest a trajectory or proximity to thresholds.

Land cover refers to the observed physical cover of the Earth’s surface which describes the distribution of vegetation types, water bodies and human-made infrastructure. This sub-indicator serves two functions for SDG indicator 15.3.1: (1) changes in land cover may point to land degradation when there is a loss of ecosystem services that are considered desirable in a local or national context; and (2) a land cover classification system can be used to disaggregate the other two sub-indicators, thus increasing the indicator’s policy relevance. This sub-indicator is also expected to be used for reporting on SDG indicators 6.6.1, 11.3.1 and 15.1.1.

Land productivity refers to the total above-ground net primary production (NPP) defined as the energy fixed by plants minus their respiration which translates into the rate of biomass accumulation that delivers a suite of ecosystem services.

Carbon stock is the quantity of carbon in a “pool”: a reservoir which has the capacity to accumulate or release carbon and is comprised of above- and below-ground biomass, dead organic matter, and soil organic carbon.

The indicator can be disaggregated by land cover class or other spatially explicit land unit.

A proxy to monitor the key factors and driving variables that reflect the capacity to deliver land-based ecosystem services.

While access to remote sensing imagery has improved dramatically in recent years, there is still a need for essential historical time series that is currently only available at coarse to medium resolution. The expectation is that the availability of high-resolution, locally-calibrated datasets will increase rapidly in the near future.

The definition of SFM by the UN General Assembly contains several key aspects, notably that sustainable forest management is a concept which varies over time and between countries, whose circumstances – ecological, social and economic – vary widely, but that it should always address a wide range of forest values, including economic, social and environmental values, and take intergenerational equity into account. Clearly a simple measure of forest area is insufficient to monitor sustainable forest management as a whole. 

All the metadata shown in this document was gathered from United Nation Statistics Division. The metadata was extracted from https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/metadata/.