ИСТИНА

Being defined as a “state”, the LDN is likely to serve as a universal indicator for different modern concepts, such as SLM, either Climate Change (or disaster risk) Adaptation, ecosystem resilience and/or vulnerability, or some others, which are not clear enough, and sound mostly as slogans without concrete and simple content. The application is obvious and could be interpreted as the achieving LDN within specified spatial and temporal limits means that this land is managed in “sustainable” way or “adapted” to any possible environmental changes within the same limits. Anyway, it must be noted that there are different approaches to indicate LDN state, existing at present time, which needs coherent harmonization. One is what we name as an “Anti-Degradation call”, which sounds in general like “(Eco) system(s) overall harmony needs safety”. This call is coming from the “environmental” community, and mainly corresponds to the global environmental issues and ecosystem services. Another is a “Production-defensive call” sounding like “Sustainability of resources and bioproductivity required”, and it is coming mainly from “food security”, agricultural, and “natural resource management” communities. If the first is oriented on the environmental safety, another is oriented on the production and economic matters. This means in general, that to the moment there are two main groups of indicators to be considered as possible indicators for LDN as a state. Both groups relate to the issue of “What matters do we measure for LDN?” First of them is “measuring land degradation”, which contains different possible options discovered and developed to different degrees: land quality, land quantity, scores of “relative fertility”, land availability, soil/environmental health, etc. Second group explore the possibilities of measuring what the land produces, and consist of different and numerous biophysical and also economic and social parameters, such as bio-productivity, yield, vegetation cover, NDVI, income, economic and social benefits, ecosystem services, and others In view of the current and expected global pressures on the land to keep feeding an increasing world population, the “second group” is a bit more developed as a significant aspect is pointed to the importance of land productivity, its preservation or sustainable increase, and the knowledge on the current rates of land productivity. This has three key consequences (EC JRC, 2014): (i) a baseline has to be established against which to measure changes in land productivity; (ii) commitment to specified targets have to be agreed, (iii) mechanisms to monitor and assess the state of the land, and land productivity, at all scales have to be realized. One more issue of the application of LDN as an indicator addresses the question on “What balance do we measure for LDN?” As it has been mentioned earlier, the LDN dynamics can be measures as a balance, which in turn requires a baseline for further monitoring. There are almost no doubts that for this purpose the state of the land and degradation/restoration processes (in terms of national- and site-specific indicators selected from the options described above) to the date of the last evaluation within a specific spatial scale can be determined as a necessary baseline. In this case evaluation of the LDN progress can be measured by the ratio between land degradation (or risk of) and restoration (or avoiding/ preventing), which should not exceed ‘1’ temporarily and spatially in terms of their areas. Indicators and/or metrics to reflect these ratio/balances can include different approaches based on the comprehensive assessment of available land quantity, land qualities and land degradation risks adaptive to various countries and areas, e.g.: between degraded/restored, destroyed (or alienated)/rehabilitated, between productive/unproductive, contaminated/recovered, etc. It can include not only the indicators of land and soil quality, but also indicators of land grabbing, soil contamination, land availability, changes in land use/land cover, economic and social benefits, and others suitable for particular curcumstances.