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The purpose of this indicator is to ensure that mountains are efficiently managed, and a better balance is struck between conservation and sustainable use of natural resource.

The Green Cover Index is meant to measure the changes of the green vegetation in mountain areas in order to monitor progress on the mountain target. The index will provide information on the changes in the vegetation cover and an indication of the status of the conservation of mountain environments.

Forest Department

Forest Department

Annual

Ratio of the total mountain area and converted to a percentage (%)

The scientific mountain community recognizes that there is a direct correlation between the green coverage of mountain areas and their state of health, and as a consequence their capacity of fulfilling their ecosystem roles. Monitoring mountain vegetation changes over time provides an adequate measure of the status of conservation of mountain ecosystems.

Mountains are defined according to the UNEP-WCMC classification that identifies them according to altitude, slope and local elevation range as described by Kapos et al. 2000:

Class 1: elevation > 4,500 meters;

Class 2: elevation 3,500–4,500 meters;

Class 3: elevation 2,500–3,500 meters;

Class 4: elevation 1,500–2,500 meters and slope > 2;

Class 5: elevation 1,000–1,500 meters and slope > 5 or local elevation range (LER 7-kilometre radius) > 300 meters;

Class 6: elevation 300–1,000 meters and local elevation range (7-kilometre radius) > 300 meters

by mountain elevation class.

The indicator results from the juxtaposition of land cover data extracted from FAO Collect Earth tool (that was used to build the Global Forest Survey (GFS) Global Assessment map) and the global map of mountains produced by FAO/MPS in 2015 based on the UNEP-WMCM mountain classification. The baseline statistics for the Mountain Green Cover Index are based on the GFS Global Assessment map released in January 2017. Green cover includes forest land, grassland/shrubland and cropland. The amounts of land in square kilometres covered by each of these three IPCC land cover/land use classes are aggregated to calculate the size of the total mountain area that they cover in each country. This figure is then expressed as a ratio of the total mountain area and converted to a percentage, providing the value of the Mountain Green Cover Index of each country.

This indicator is an effective tool used by the Forest Department to show how mountain ecosystems evolve and to assess their state of conservation and health.

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The indicator is based on Collect Earth, the most modern technology available. Its user friendliness and smooth learning curve make it a perfect tool for performing fast, accurate and cost-effective assessments. It is free, open source and highly customizable for the specific data collection needs and methodologies. It builds upon very high resolution multi-temporal images from Google Earth and Bing Maps and Landsat 7 and 8 datasets from Google Earth Engine. Data and images are stored and globally available for any year from 2000, making possible the monitoring of the change over time.

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/.