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Home to around 25% of the world population, Drylands contain some of the most threatened and disregarded ecosystems facing pressures due to climate change-related extended droughts, regional warming and an ever-growing human population inevitably increasing risks of land degradation and desertification. Many restoration initiatives are being implemented in drylands, but many limitations are present in knowledge management and sharing. There is, therefore, a relevant need for a system dedicated to dryland monitoring and assessment particularly when it comes to local systemized and analysed reporting methods.

Following the two successful Global Dryland Monitoring Weeks in 2015 and 2016 during which stakeholders committed to the Rome Promise, an interactive web portal for the monitoring of forest and land restoration was initiated: the Dryland Restoration Initiative Platform (DRIP). Under suggestion of the Committee on Forestry Working Group on Dryland Forests and Agrosilvopastoral Systems, this re-developed platform will be linked with national data and existent information platforms.

Now, the DRIP is currently under revision and it will be developed as a module hosted in the Framework for Ecosystem Restoration Monitoring (FERM) platform. The FERM platform already integrates data from the WOCAT database providing information on existent best practices and the impact of restoration measures, country commitments to the Rio Conventions, and land use change dynamics. Developing DRIP as a module in FERM will ensure synergies with existing databases, an alignment with the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration and long-term sustainability of the platform. DRIP will also draw data in specific fields by linking with existing data from global platforms such as Collect Earth, Google Earth Engine and trends.earth. Lastly, DRIP will gather additional data that will help countries to track progress towards Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) targets in drylands and spread awareness of new adaptive management measures. DRIP will also explore opportunities to be recognized as one tool of the ‘tool box’ facilitated by the GEO LDN Initiative, a collaborative platform to bring all LDN relevant tools together.

The target users of this revised tool will be practitioners, governments, decision makers, international organization, researchers and the broader academia. Following consultation meetings with various organizations working on LDN, drylands and restorations, a meeting was held on the 15^th of December 2020 to share the revised version of the DRIP and roadmap for its development. In 2021 much work will be done to the new and improved version of the DRIP to ensure countries and communities are supported in their reporting process and facilitate knowledge sharing and close cooperation amongst dryland areas of the world.