Conference,
Status-quo of selected nationally determined contributions in West African countries using spaceborne remote sensing – a data perspective
(2022)
Abstract
With the nationally determined contributions (NDCs), Parties of the Paris Agreement (PA) keep hold of the policy goals and measurements, which they consider crucial for their nations’ climate action plans. Progress towards the NDCs must be communicated every five years, which is why monitoring their implementation and effectiveness is essential. Here, we take a step towards deriving information on the status-quo of selected NDCs of West African (WA) countries using open-access spaceborne remote sensing (RS) products, by comparing the Food and Agriculture Organization Corporate Statistical Database (FAOSTAT) land-use (LU) data and RS-derived annual land-cover (LC) maps produced by the European Space Agency Climate Change Initiative project and the Copernicus Global Land Monitoring Service, respectively, regarding set goals in the forest sector. Forests are a key policy sector for which mitigation and adaptation goals, such as reforestation/afforestation, are listed in WA countries’ NDC documents from 2015. For the years 2015 to 2019, we compare the datasets regarding values in forest area (kha) at country-level and the NDC goal “increased annual reforestation/afforestation” using Ghana as case study. Log-linear regression modeling was used to assess the proportion of the variance between the datasets. The Kruskal-Wallis-Test was applied to test the annual difference of the datasets for each country. Our results show significant differences in estimated forest area values among datasets and countries, whereby the LC products estimate either higher or lower forest area than the LU data. Although the LC products show similar directions of forest values, i.e., either higher or lower estimates for most countries, than the LU data, they depict different magnitudes in values and diverging directions in the change of forest area over time. Thus, we identified deviating outcomes regarding the progress towards the NDC goal “increased annual reforestation/afforestation” depending on the dataset used. Our results underline the importance of data source comparison and the prevailing issue that open-access data and products are often based on diverging methods, definitions, and different accuracies, which can have significant impact on the reporting of policy goals and agreements. This points towards the necessity to push further standardization ambitions to allow for comparable and robust evidence for monitoring progress to achieve the PA.
