Indicators used to measure effective land management need to be simplified and agreement reached on data collection methods, says Tony Simons, Director General of the World Agroforestry Centre in an article in SciDev.Net.

“When it comes to land management planning, we don’t have a system and, because of that, we don’t manage this resource well,” said Simons. He was speaking at the International Alliance of Research Universities’ Sustainability Science Congress in Copenhagen, Denmark, on 23 October

Simons says there needs to be a clear system to determine which factors are important for judging the effects of human activities on the environment. Currently there are hundreds of indicators, but Simons suggests 8 indicators could be adopted: soil organic carbon, water balance, water use, biodiversity, emissions, productivity, strength of farmer organizations, and government institutions and infrastructure.

While the data currently being gathered is sound, Simons believes vague definitions mean that researchers are not always measuring the same thing. “For example, governments can classify a seriously degraded forest as ‘temporarily unstocked’ rather than ‘deforested’ if they have vague plans to replant it in the future, which gives an inaccurate representation of the situation.”

With the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) currently being finalized, it will be important to give priority to land management issues such as reducing land degradation, desertification and deforestation.

Read the full story: Land management is ‘drowning in a sea of data’

See also: Taking the pulse on biodiversity and environmental health: decision support tools, metrics and indicators