Assessing Land Degradation (SDG 15.3) in Latin America: Western Coast of Mexico

Abstract

Latin American countries face extreme challenges in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) due to inequalities in access to information and economic resource allocation and a lack of effective political management. While Mexico is active in terms of the SDGs, the SDG related to land degradation has not been met. In 2015, Mexico ranked third in Latin America for the largest area of degraded land (47%), reducing the potential productivity of the soil, increasing arid lands, and compromising biological and/or economic productivity. This case study analyzes the Tomatlán Basin (257,915 ha) to evaluate the influence of agriculture on land degradation from 2000 to 2020 using the open-access tool Trends.Earth, which calculates trends in vegetation productivity and soil organic carbon changes using the global inputs MODIS and SoilGrids, respectively. Land cover transitions were calculated with regional inputs, and land cover maps were generated with Landsat imagery and the Dzetsaka classification tool in QGIS. The results show improvement in land conditions due to increased vegetation productivity related to ecological succession processes on 207,000 ha (80.6% of the territory), which is nine times larger than degraded territory (23,172 ha), indicating progress toward the 15.3 SDG target. The results were validated by using Google Earth Pro to identify degraded areas, achieving 92.5% accuracy. Trends.Earth is a useful tool for monitoring land degradation at different scales in countries with limited information and economic resources, allowing the identification of degraded areas so that appropriate practices and activities can be implemented.