Applying Earth Observations to Enhance Sustainable Urbanization and Human Settlement Planning Around the World

CI’s existing collaboration with the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) to assist countries and regions with building national capacities for monitoring and reporting on land degradation, and the development of Trends.Earth that was produced as part of a project funded by the Global Environment Facility, titled “Enabling the use of global data sources to assess and monitor land degradation at multiple scales”, were foundational to this effort. In addition, the availability of global Landsat imagery and data sets such as GMIS have also been essential for this work. Efforts by Colombia's DANE have helped guide the overall approach and methodology. Existing collaboration among NASA, GEO and UN Habitat have also served as a key enabling factor. Future trainings, including webinars and in-person sessions, will facilitate further evaluation across the world and provide valuable feedback for algorithm tuning and tool refinement.

Some noteworthy constraints include: the availability of gridded population growth data sets and their application for SDG calculations, as well as the broad interpretation of SDG calculations as currently implemented. The increasing availability of consistent, high resolution, global urbanization time series data sets, global land cover and land use data, as well as very high spatial resolution reference data for training and verification purposes will provide improved capabilities to quantify and assess urban land consumption, and improve the accuracy and fidelity of the SDG calculations in the future. Variable levels of resources by in-country partners as well as availability of local urban extent or population data within each country may make the approach more or less accessible to certain countries, and thus cause difficulties in comparisons of urban sustainability across countries.