South Africa undertook a national Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) target setting process during 2017/18 in response to the United Nations Convention to Combatting Desertification’s call for signatory countries to voluntarily commit to LDN as also requested under Sustainability Development Goal 15.3.

Highlights

•South Africa successfully developed land degradation neutrality targets.
•Biomes rather than land cover types form the fundamental unit of analysis.
•Subjectively and objectively developed bassline data was combined for identifying priority interventions.
•The global indicators proved problematic for identifying interventions.
•Alien plant invasions and woody plant densification were the most pressing degradation problems needing intervention.

The process was supported by the Global Mechanism (GM) and followed their guidelines. This resulted in an ambitious set of targets being set for 2030. Early in the process it was recognised that biome level or landscape process based (bush encroachment, alien plant species removal) targets were more appropriate than location specific targets.

South Africa has used the World Overview of Conservation Technologies and Approaches (WOCAT) Mapping Questionnaire (QM), to conducted two, ten years apart, assessments based on experts’ perception of municipal level land degradation. The spatial location and extent of degradation, as identified from these studies, differed substantially from the three global indicators suggested as a baseline for LDN target setting.

An analysis of the reasons for the discrepancies between the UNCCD indicators from the perception-based studies, and the implications this has for setting and monitoring South African land degradation is the main focus of this paper.