The Guyanese natural resources endowment is threatened by a progressive pattern of land degradation through inappropriate land use and management practices and lack of reclamation efforts that are making land unproductive, affecting biodiversity and ecosystem services, and exacerbating risks of climate change. With the technical assistance from FAO and financial support from Guyana REDD+ Investment Fund (GRIF), the Guyana Lands and Surveys Commission (GLSC) invest in reversing land degradation and promoting sustainable land development and management. With an increasing temporal and spatial resolution of satellite imagery, the use of geospatial technologies and remote sensing is rapidly increasing to monitor land and water characteristics through free, open-source and global satellite data. With the objective to identify and monitor land degradation and promote sustainable land management and ecosystem restoration where land is degraded, FAO, under project “Mainstreaming Sustainable Land Development and Management in the Cooperative Republic of Guyana” (GCP/GUY/003/GRI), has provided two trainings via a new module on SEPAL platform to monitor SDG indicator 15.3.1 (proportion of land that is degraded over total land area).

This module is a cloud-computing application that follows the latest Good Practice Guidance (version 2) for SDG indicator 15.3.1. The tool allows customized user-specific applications and the preparation of local-to-national scale geospatial SDG indicator 15.3.1. The interface is simple and intuitive. Technical assistance is provided to understand the core approach and properly interpret the result.

FAO in collaboration with Guyana Lands and Surveys Commission (GLSC) organized two four-day long online trainings on January 24-27th and February 28-March 3d, 2022 on “Use of SEPAL platform for assessment and monitoring of land degradation and restoration activities”. Twenty-nine national experts from eight national organizations participated in the virtual trainings (GLSC, Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Housing and Water, Ministry of Natural Resources, Agriculture Institute, Office of the President, Guyana Geology and Mines Commission and Guyana Forestry Commission). The training included theoretical and practical presentations, question-and-answer sessions, as well as hands-on lessons. The participants prepared their own areas of interest (AOIs) for the assessment of land degradation and restoration monitoring using the SEPAL SDG indicator module with global datasets. The results were presented, and the next steps and use of the results were discussed.

Amit Ghosh, who co-developed the SEPAL Module 15.3.1, highlighted the importance to provide access to cloud-based computing applications that are related to national needs and systems.