The Conference of the Parties,
Methodological issues
6. Encourages the two subsidiary bodies of the Convention to work with their Bureaux to continue the good collaboration on topics related to methodology development for the indicators;
7. Requests the secretariat to use the resources available to further improve methodological guidelines and tools for the next reporting process and address bottlenecks highlighted by Parties in the last reporting process;
8. Also requests the secretariat to align the reporting process for strategic objectives 1– 5 with the gender-responsive indicators and guidelines under development as part of the Gender Action Plan activities to ensure that the gender dimensions of land degradation are fully captured;
9. Encourages the Science-Policy Interface, in its review of the Land Degradation and Restoration Assessment of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, to update the Committee on Science and Technology on the direct and indirect drivers of land degradation and compare this review with the information reported by country Parties;
10. Requests the secretariat and invites technical partners and intergovernmental initiatives such as the Group on Earth Observations Land Degradation Neutrality Initiative to continue improving the default data provided for strategic objective 1 in order to find solutions to the issue of harmonizing divergent data. Common underlying methodologies may be used in order to improve the spatial resolution of data provided in default datasets;
11. Also requests the secretariat to further analyse and present global and regional data in interactive formats; 12. Further requests the secretariat and the Global Mechanism and encourage Parties to assess and further refine the baseline to be used in future reporting cycles;
Annex
Tiered drought indicator and monitoring framework
1. The criteria for establishing a specific indicator for the strategic objective on drought (strategic objective 3) and the establishment of a monitoring framework are:
(a) Indicator set hierarchy and logic. Following the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) indicator set hierarchy, which makes it possible to distinguish what to measure (progress indicators) and how it should be measured (candidate metrics/proxies):
I. Strategic objectives
a. Progress indicators
i. Metrics/proxies;
(b) Sensitivity of the indicator to the strategic objective which, here, focuses on how drought affects the resilience of vulnerable populations and ecosystems to future drought;
(c) Comparability of nationally reported data on candidate metrics/proxies for the indicator, with consideration of issues concerning the development and practical implementation of international standards in underlying data, methodologies and guidance;
(d) Readiness of candidate metrics/proxies for the indicator for operational use, based on the suitability of the indicator and challenges that may need to be overcome for its effective use, including: (i) Global coverage of candidate metrics/proxies for the indicator to enable the development of national estimates and provide them to affected country Parties from global datasets, as default data; and (ii) Capacity to create ownership at the national level, whereby countries can follow standardized guidance to develop indicator data, empowering them to validate, replace or reject the default data;
(e) Gender disaggregation potential or the ability for indicator data to be collected, analysed and reported upon with respect to gender in order to ensure assessment of the contributive differences in the distribution of achievements between women and men;
(f) Adaptability. It is recommended that both the Drought Monitoring Framework and the indicator set be regularly re-evaluated for (i) suitability as monitoring and evaluation efforts mature; and (ii) usefulness in decision-making given that needs may change and scientific tools may improve;
2. The tiered approach for the establishment of an indicator and monitoring framework for United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification strategic objective 3 on drought is provided in the table below.
