Monitoring Land Degradation Neutrality using Geospatial Techniques in Support of Sustainable Land Management: A Case Study of Narok County.

Abstract

Land degradation is a worldwide phenomenon defined as “a gradual reduction or loss in the biological or economic productive capacity of the land” (UNCCD, 2016). Land degradation is closely linked with major global environmental themes like climate change, food and water security, biodiversity decline and overall loss of ecosystem funct ions and services (Giuliani, et al., 2020). The main cause of land degradation is the change in land use and land management practices including overgrazing, deforestation and monocultures. Fortunately, the importance of healthy landscapes as the basis for healthy societies and economies has been recognized by the global community. The land degradation neutral world goal is clearly stated in the Sustainable Development Goals targets. This project employed Remote Sensing, GIS technologies together with ‘Trends. Earth’ model and Google Earth Engine to monitor land degradation status and trend in Narok County in Kenya. Three sub-indicators; change in Land Cover obtained from Landsat images, change in Land Productivity and change in Soil Organic Carbon were used to analyse the aggregate land degradation status using the principle of one-out-all-out on their overlayed pixels. The study quantified the proportion of land in Narok county that is degraded, stable and the areas with improvements by overlaying change in land cover, change in soil organic carbon and change in land productivity datasets. The results showed that 54.13% of Narok county is stable, 41.48% is degraded and 4.39% of the county is improving. This study has shown that geospatial technologies have an important role in the realization of the SDGs, especially SDG 15 which deals with life on land. Land degradation is proven through this study to be occurring at the local or pixel level; therefore, the county governments and civil societies should engage the communities in sustainable land management and ecosystem restoration activities. This study managed to highlight the land degradation status of Narok County. However, there is still an opportunity for further research to demonstrate how these results can change when uniform and high spatial resolution datasets are used.