Secretariat of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification

Group on Earth Observations – GEO Week 2023

Statement of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD)

According to the latest UN data, between 2015 and 2019, the world has been losing at least 100 million hectares of healthy and productive land every year, posing a severe threat to the lives of billions of people. This estimate, based on a partial assessment of available country data, amounts to approximately 80 per cent of the total land area of South Africa degraded globally per year.

From 13 to 17 November 2023, Parties to the United Nations Conventions to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) will meet in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, to discuss the latest global trends in land degradation and drought, and review how countries are progressing with land restoration.

Their deliberations will be informed by a country-by-country global assessment of land degradation, which involved 115 national reports and 52 government-approved estimates, all derived from Earth Observation data sources.

The benefits of open data, as espoused by the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), have been demonstrated in this national reporting process with Parties having access to over 70 Earth observation data layers spanning 20 years and collated from the best available open data sources.

By combining cutting-edge geospatial information, technology and services, the UNCCD has successfully transformed its national reporting platform and will launch a spatially dynamic data dashboard for global access to the results in October 2023. Innovation in applying Earth observation data in support of policy decisions while increasing universal data access have been key pillars of UNCCD’s data-driven transformation in line with the Secretary General’s ‘Data Strategy for Action by Everyone, Everywhere’.

We are proud of the progress made in our journey towards data-driven decision making, which could never have been achieved in isolation.

The UNCCD is grateful for the ongoing efforts of GEO towards the development of Earth Observation solutions that accelerate action on global, societal, and environmental challenges through improved observation systems. We value GEO’s efforts to serve as a global platform for governments to gain and shared streamlined access to earth observations and the derived information, knowledge and technology, enabling them to develop national solutions to the global environmental challenges of our time.

We wish to underline the importance of the GEO Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) flagship, a collective partnership that brings the entire Earth Observation community together to help our country Parties address land degradation through coordinated observations, technologies and tools. GEO LDN plays a crucial role in ensuring that the achievement of LDN under SDG target 15.3 is underpinned by an open, interoperable, and collaborative approach to data provision, tool design and capacity development.

The UNCCD secretariat welcomes the GEO Post-2025 Strategy which makes Earth Intelligence a central driver of transformational change as we seek to restore the balance between humanity and nature. Healthy land is essential for integrating and accelerating progress on all of the Sustainable Development Goals, and it is the cooperative spirit all Earth observation organizations have brought to the global efforts to achieve land degradation neutrality that gives full voice to the saying “the whole is far greater than the sum of the parts”.

We look forward to a strengthened collaboration between the UNCCD and the GEO to meet the needs of our Parties and your Members across the globe through both well-established initiatives, such as the GEO LDN flagship, and new ambitious endeavors like the GEO Global Ecosystem Atlas, which if successful will generate major positive impact and momentum towards achieving Agenda 2030 and the goals of the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.