UNCCD unveils new guidance on land degradation and drought
reporting

Bonn, 29 September 2021 – Two new guidance documents have
been released today: a revised and upgraded version of Good Practice
Guidance for Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) indicator 15.3.1 and
new Good Practice Guidance for national reporting on UNCCD strategic
objective 3.

These guidances add to the body of knowledge and expertise
available to the Parties for the 2022 UNCCD reporting process, to be launched
in early November 2021. They will help the Parties tracking their progress in
addressing land degradation and in mitigating, adapting to, and managing the
effects of drought.

Version 2 of the Good
Practice Guidance for Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) indicator 15.3.1 informs
the work of Parties, particularly on monitoring and understanding the status of
land cover, land productivity and soil organic carbon stocks using Earth
observation data. These are the three major variables used to measure SDG
indicator 15.3.1 - Proportion of land that is degraded over total land area.  The
new version is more advanced in the analytical methods for calculating the
Indicator, and reflects current best practice, data and knowledge.

Originally published in 2017, this guidance has been rapidly
adopted by country Parties. In 2018, 127 country Parties were able to report
information on SDG indicator 15.3.1 showing that about one fifth of the Earth’s
land area (more than 2 billion hectares) is degraded.

 This rapid uptake was
due in part to a close collaboration between the UNCCD, the Commonwealth Scientific
and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), which produced the guidance for
the UNCCD, and Conservation International, which made data and models
accessible through an open-source software product called Trends.Earth. This
highly collaborative approach is continuing today under the auspices of the
Group on Earth Observation Land Degradation Neutrality (GEO LDN) Initiative.

The new Good
Practice Guidance for national reporting on UNCCD strategic objective 3 supports
Parties to report on the hazard posed by drought, the population exposed to
drought and the vulnerability of those exposed to harm. These are the three
fundamental components of drought risk, and each is represented by an indicator
in the monitoring framework adopted by Parties in decision 11.COP.14. This
Guidance is consistent with international standards and relevant resolutions of
the World Meteorological Organization. It balances state-of-the-art
methodologies and data availability with the need for relative simplicity and
global applicability.

Through this Guidance, the UNCCD aims to
improve collaboration among global drought monitoring efforts within all
relevant intergovernmental mechanisms, without replacing the approaches and
level of granularity needed to monitor drought at the national and local
levels.

 https://www.unccd.int/news-events/unccd-unveils-new-guidance-land-degradation-and-drought-reporting