Call For Competition Entries
Deadline: 31 August 2020
The GEO-LDN Competition is an international technology innovation competition to design and build software analytics solutions to support more transparent and well-informed land use decisions at the local to national level across the globe. Winning solutions will be promoted by the GEO-LDN Initiative and the UNCCD for use by all countries committed to set voluntary LDN targets and to monitor and report on SDG Indicator 15.3.1 “Proportion of land that is degraded over total land area”. The winner(s) of the competition will also benefit from financial and technical support valued at USD 100,000 for the transformation of the prototype into an operational and scalable tool, and a 2-year license for free access to use Google Earth Engine (GEE) as part of their solution.
The challenge is to develop a software tool to implement, or support the implementation of a “neutrality mechanism” for LDN within a well-established open source model that allows for trade-off analysis, and which can then be adapted for use by any other such modelling tools.
A “neutrality mechanism” refers to a no net loss land use planning module that would allow users to generate scenario maps of the anticipated future impact of all land uses for a given area in net terms. The resulting “neutrality maps” would allow the visualization and quantification of gains (where interventions are planned to reverse past land degradation), stable areas (where the land-based natural capital can be maintained through good management), and anticipated losses (where realistically it is determined that land degradation may not be avoidable). No net loss would occur when the planner is able to generate a scenario where all anticipated losses can be counterbalanced with planned gains for each land type, while the integrity of all other land is maintained. More details about the neutrality mechanism for LDN are available in Cowie et al. 2018, and in Module C of the Scientific Conceptual Framework for Land Degradation Neutrality.
By addressing this challenge, the competition will contribute to fulfill decision 18/COP.14, in which country Parties requested the UNCCD Science-Policy Interface to stimulate the development of “a demonstration, resulting from an open call, of how LDN can be incorporated into existing open source land use planning and trade-off analysis tools.”
Who is eligible?
- Any person or organization of any kind is eligible to participate;
- Successful teams will require a range of skills (technical, policy, planning, etc.). Therefore applications will be accepted from consortia. Consortia must consist of a minimum of:
- At least one technical implementer;
- At least one representative of a (sub-)national stakeholder group (i.e. data user) – such as a local government institution involved in territorial planning, a civil society organization engaged in sustainable land management, an indigenous community fighting against land degradation and land take, a farmer group managing the conversion to organic farming, or any other governmental or non-governmental stakeholder involved in avoiding, reducing and reversing land degradation;
- Employees or affiliates of the UNCCD, GEO or any of the organisations affiliated with any member of the GEO-LDN Leadership team can enter the competition, but will not be eligible to receive the financial component of the award.
Download the full competition rules
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