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| Background |
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LAND COVER
Land cover assessment and monitoring of its dynamics are essential requirements
for the sustainable management of natural resources, environmental protection,
food security, humanitarian programmes as well as core data for monitoring and
modelling. Land cover data are therefore fundamental in fulfilling the mandates
of many United Nations, international and national institutions and programmes.
Despite the recognition of such importance, current users of land cover data still lack access to sufficient
reliable or comparable baseline land cover data. These data are essential to
tackle the increasing concerns in regards to food security, environmental
degradation, and climate change. In particular land cover data is required
to:
- Assess and model the impacts of climate change;
- Monitor biodiversity and providing timely and reliable information
on land cover changes;
- Monitor desert fringes and identifying areas threatened with severe
land degradation (e.g. deforestation, overgrazing, diversion of water
resources, etc.);
- Monitor and assess the extent of natural disasters (e.g. drought,
floods, wildfires);
- Assess vegetation cover, monitoring its development and providing
timely inputs to regional food security early warning systems;
- Monitor large scale deforestation, changes in wetlands, and areas of
cultivated land, and providing inputs to the primary net productivity
models and the models for quantification of carbon sinks and sources;
- Rational land use planning based on agro-ecological zoning in order to
support sustainable intensification of agricultural production, and
Sustainable management of land and water resources and environmental
protection.
STAKEHOLDER REQUIREMENTS
Concerns and recommendations for coordinated, systematic and harmonized
collection and assessment of data on land cover and environmental
conditions, especially for monitoring of the environment, have been
raised by many national governments and international conventions and
treaties:
- The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development
(UNCED) of Rio de Janeiro (1992), Agenda 21;
- the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg,
in 2002;
- the Convention on Biological Diversity;
- the Group on Earth Observations (GEO);
- United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC);
- the European Commission INSPIRE Directive;
- the declarations of
Artimino,
Dakar and
Quito.
These are all examples of the broad stakeholder need for a
harmonized land cover mapping effort.
GLOBAL LAND COVER NETWORK
In 2004 the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and
the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), with the financial and technical
support of the Government of Italy through the Cooperazione Italiana and the
Istituto Agronomico per l’Oltremare (IAO), created the Global Land Cover
Network (GLCN) with the specific aim to answer the request of stakeholders.
Specifically the objectives of the initiative are to establish a global collaboration for developing a fully harmonized approach to make the required
reliable and comparable land cover and land cover change data accessible
to local, national and international initiatives. In particular, GLCN is
intended to support the stakeholder community in developing countries
that have difficulty in producing and releasing reliable, consistent
and updated information.
AFRICOVER UNDERPINNINGS
GLCN is based on the success of the Africover project which was established
in response to a number of national requests for assistance in the development
of reliable and georeferred information on natural resources. These data
are needed for: early warning; food security; agriculture; disaster prevention
and management; forest and rangeland monitoring; environmental planning;
watershed catchments management; statistics on natural resources; biodiversity
studies, and climate change modelling.
The key success to the Africover initiative is the development of the
Multipurpose
Africover Database for the Environmental Resources (MADE)
which can be accessed by all stakeholders and users. This is produced at
a scale of 1:200 000 (and at 1:100 000 for small countries and specific
areas) and contains digital georeferenced databases with geodetic homogeneous
referential, toponyms, roads and hydrography data.
Africover has greatly reinforced national and subregional capacities for the
establishment, update and use of land cover maps and spatial data bases.
This has ensured an operational approach and the sustainability of the
initiative. The Africover-East Africa project had as an overall objective
the improvement of the availability of reliable, timely and location-specific
Land Cover information in the following ten countries: Burundi, the
Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Eritrea, Kenya, Rwanda, Somalia,
Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda. This represents an area of 9.5 million km2.
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