Secretariat of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification

Governments have reported that, between 2015 and 2019, the world has been losing at least 100 million hectares of healthy and productive land every year, affecting billions of people. We must urgently stop further land degradation and restore at least 1 billion hectares to bring the land back in balance by 2030. The national assessments conducted by governments on the state of the world’s land would not have been possible without Earth Observation which allows us to systematically take the pulse of the planet and tell the world about the worsening global land degradation crisis.

UNCCD recognizes that, in moving from a GEO initiative to a flagship, GEO LDN has galvanized the entire Earth Observation community around a central goal – to help all countries of the world reach land degradation neutrality by 2030 through coordinated observations, technologies and tools underpinned by agreed international standards. The mantra goes: “You can’t manage what you can’t measure” – and the GEO LDN flagship, has been central to addressing this in the fight against land degradation.