Soil indicators and SDGs

Photo credit: SciDevNet

Image credit: flickr/John Isaac, UN

• Push for soil indicators to help monitor SDGs

  Speed read

  • The MDGs include just one indicator of land use and none of soil quality
  • This should change for the SDGs, say specialists, as they relate to many goals
  • Soil specialists can learn from climate scientists in changing policy

  A group of land and soil specialists has proposed three indicators to measure soil health that they say could help the UN monitor its future Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

  The UN’s Millennium Development Goals, which expire this year, include one indicator referring directly to land use (the proportion of land area covered by forest) and none related to soil quality. But things should change under the SDGs, which will guide global development efforts after 2015, say the soil managers in a statement issued earlier this month (3 March).

  The authors lay out a package of three indicators to track both biophysical and socioeconomic changes: land cover and land use change; land productivity change; and change in soil organic carbon. These topics deserve more political attention, and the UN’s Statistical Commission should include these measures in its list of indicators to monitor progress towards the SDGs, the authors say.
  Read the full article: SciDevNet

 

Forestry and SDGs

Photo credit: CIFOR

A giant Brazil nut tree in the Unamat forest, Puerto Maldonado, Madre de Dios, Peru. Brazil nuts form a crucial addition to livelihoods in parts of the Peruvian Amazon. Marco Simola/CIFOR photo

Sustainable Development Goals and forestry: Lessons from Peru

BY BARBARA FRASER

EXCERPT

In Peru and throughout the Amazon Basin, people depend on forests for meat, fruits and seeds, medicines, palm fronds for thatch, and many other products.

Those contributions, along with their role in buffering the effects of climate change, make forests crucial for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a proposed global framework for guiding poverty reduction and ensuring a sustainable future.

“Forestry contributes to the solution of development challenges,” said Peter Holmgren, Director General of the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) in Bogor, Indonesia. “Forests can contribute to the elimination of poverty, to food security, to prosperity in the green economy and to energy.”

The SDGs, which will come up for a vote at the UN General Assembly in September,grew out of the Rio+20 conference in Brazil in 2012.

WHERE FORESTS FIT IN 

The 17 goals aim to, among other things, eliminate poverty, hunger and inequality while supporting economic opportunity—a significant part of which is the sustainable management of the natural resources on which economic and social development depend.

Only one goal—No. 15—specifically addresses environmental issues, calling for sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainable management of forests, and a halt to land degradation and biodiversity loss.

Read the full article: CIFOR