Implications of differing forest cover estimates for conservation and management, and reporting on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Abstract:

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were agreed to by the world’s governments in 2015 as a “blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all.” Of those goals, SDG 15 addresses “life on land,” with an ambitious Target 15.2 of halting deforestation by 2020, with a complementary Indicator 15.1.1 requesting that countries monitor “forest areas as a proportion of total land area.” In support of that, efforts like the Group on Earth Observations (GEO)’s Earth Observations for Sustainable Development (EO4SDG) initiative have highlighted the role that Earth observation data can play in monitoring progress on the SDGs. The last decade has also seen ready availability of relevant global or regional scale datasets, from sources including NASA, the Copernicus program, and the Global Forest Watch, among others. The implications for tropical forested regions like Central America – home to the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor biodiversity hotspot – are noteworthy. Between 1998 and 2020, for instance, some 71 remotely sensed land cover and forest cover datasets of Central America were generated, at either the regional or global scale. While one dataset indicates that the region possessed ~74.7% forest cover circa 1980, more recent forest cover estimates differ substantially, with estimates ranging from 13.4% to 75.5% for 2017. Provided that the region’s governments are interested in using such remotely sensed products for tracking SDG Indicator 15.1.1, the discrepancies among sources would make that difficult, even as it would be simple to merely attribute differences to distinctions among data sources and methodologies. In response, this paper will present an in-depth analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the datasets – a necessary step for providing the region’s governments with guidance on how such data might be used, complementing existing national datasets and reporting processes. We will also address synergies with multiple ongoing NASA-supported SDG efforts in Central America.