Land degradation is a critical global challenge, threatening food security, biodiversity, and livelihoods. Despite international commitments under the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), progress towards Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) remains uneven. Key challenges include:
- Lack of harmonised data and methods: Diverse biophysical conditions and differing national datasets lead to inconsistencies in calculating and reporting SDG 15.3.1.
- Insufficient data resolution and coverage: Free and open EO data (e.g. MODIS, Landsat) are often too coarse for detecting changes in small or heterogeneous landscapes, particularly in small island states and hyper-arid zones.
- Limited national capacities: Many countries struggle to integrate geospatial and statistical data or to interpret complex EO-derived indicators for policy use.
- Incomplete representation of degradation drivers: Current indicators mainly track land cover, land productivity, and soil organic carbon, while processes such as soil erosion or salinisation are often excluded.
- Fragmentation among institutions: Weak coordination between the EO, mapping, and statistical communities hinders data interoperability and policy uptake.
How EO can help
EO provides a systematic, transparent, and scalable approach to understanding and managing land degradation, offering consistent and comparable data across spatial and temporal scales. Its ability to deliver continuous observations enables countries to track environmental change, assess the effectiveness of restoration measures, and report progress toward global sustainability targets such as SDG 15.3.1.
A key strength of EO lies in its capacity to establish standardised monitoring approaches. By combining global and national datasets, EO enables the generation of harmonised and reproducible indicators on land cover, productivity, and soil condition. This consistency is essential for producing reliable national and international reports and for aligning monitoring efforts with broader policy frameworks.
EO also enables fine-scale assessments that capture the complexity of land dynamics. High-resolution satellite imagery allows for detailed mapping of degradation processes, vegetation trends, and restoration activities, supporting informed land management decisions at local, regional, and national levels.
In addition, EO promotes data harmonisation and interoperability, ensuring that information collected from different sources and instruments can be integrated into a coherent analytical framework. Common standards and metadata practices make it easier to compare results across regions and to strengthen the credibility of land degradation assessments.
Beyond data provision, EO contributes to capacity building and knowledge transfer. Training initiatives, regional cooperation platforms, and online learning programmes are helping to strengthen national capacities to interpret and use EO information effectively in land monitoring and planning.
Finally, the integration of EO with socioeconomic and administrative data—such as cadastral, statistical, or land-use records—enhances the policy relevance of land degradation monitoring. Linking environmental indicators with information on land tenure, population, and economic activity supports more targeted, inclusive, and evidence-based interventions aimed at achieving land degradation neutrality.
Key examples
GEO-LDN Flagship
The GEO-LDN Flagship Initiative, led by the Group on Earth Observations, provides countries with a suite of EO tools and resources to support the calculation of land degradation indicators. Its LDN Toolbox, which includes the Trends.Earth platform, offers standardised approaches for assessing and reporting land degradation while promoting data harmonisation, capacity development, and decision-support systems at the national and regional levels.
SEND4LDN Project
The ESA-funded SEND4LDN Project, coordinated by VITO, demonstrated the potential of Sentinel-2 data for national land degradation monitoring. Using 10-metre resolution imagery, the project developed global algorithms to detect land cover and productivity changes, tested in Colombia, Portugal, and Kenya. The approach produces continuous degradation indices, improving the precision and usability of EO-based assessments for policy applications.
European Commission JRC Framework
At the European scale, the Joint Research Centre (JRC) Land Degradation Assessment Framework built upon the UNCCD methodology by integrating high-resolution European datasets such as CORINE Land Cover, MODIS NDVI, and the European Soil Observatory indicators. This enhanced methodology captures a broader range of degradation factors, including soil erosion and salinisation, offering a comprehensive regional approach to LDN monitoring.
SDG-EYES Project
The SDG-EYES Project, led by the Euro-Mediterranean Centre on Climate Change (CMCC), focuses on improving the use of Copernicus data to monitor SDG indicators, including 15.3.1. Its work on soil erosion modelling in Romania demonstrates how Copernicus services can provide scalable and reliable EO-based workflows for national SDG monitoring systems.
