Due to high population growth, unsustainable natural resources management, landscapes in Central Angola are degraded. The Centre of Tropical Ecology and Climate Change (CETAC), under the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Environment (MCTA), and other relevant departments, receive technical and financial support from FAO and GEF to monitor the status of natural resources and promote sustainable land management. With the increasing use of geospatial technologies, satellite imagery and remote sensing, to monitor land and water characteristics, free, open source and cost-effective options becomes gradually available. With the objective to better identify and monitor land degradation, and with the objective to promote sustainable land management and ecosystem restoration where land is degraded, FAO has provided a training on using a newly module available on SEPAL platform to monitor SDG indicator 15.3.1.

FAO has developed, based on the latest Good Practice Guidance for SDG indicator 15.3.1 (proportion of land that is degraded over total land area) and SEPAL cloud-computing and satellite image processing platform (http://sepal.io), an online module to provide high spatial (up to 10m) and temporal resolution information to track SDG 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, however, to properly interpret the result an understanding of the core approach is prerequisite.

In this context, as a part of ongoing efforts to strengthen capacities and for effective tracking of SDG indicators for decision makers in Angola, FAO organized a four-day online training “Use of SEPAL for preparing local to national SDG indicator 15.3.1” from 18 to 21 October 2021. Fifteen national experts from various agencies (MCTA, MASPM, MINAGRIP, MINFIN and FAO-ZAEC) participated to the training. The training included theoretical and practical presentations, question-and-answer sessions, as well as hands-on practices. Different areas of interests (AoIs) in Alto Hama, Chipipa and Chongoroi were prepared by the participants and were used for assessment of land degradation and restoration monitoring using the SEPAL SDG indicator module with global datasets. The results were presented by groups and possible interpretation was made.

While participants expressed potential benefits of using the platform in obtaining required statistics and maps related to land degradation, further improvements can be made with the availability of local and national datasets (e.g., land cover). This training contributes to strengthen capacities for better ecosystem and SDG 15.3.1 monitoring as well as contributing to national priorities and evidence-based decision making to address land degradation, in particular in the context of project “Sustainable Land Management in target landscapes of Central Angola (GCP/ANG/055/GFF)”. Amit Ghosh, Geospatial expert at the Geospatial Unit in FAO’s Land and Water Division (NSL), emphasized the importance of using geospatial as a framework to obtain timely results as much as possible using fit-for purpose datasets, to monitor and revert land degradation.