The GEO-LDN Competition’s winning Team has been announced!
Thank you to the three finalist Teams for their outstanding engagement and thank you to all the teams for demonstrating their commitment to solving one of the world’s greatest environmental challenges!
Technology competition to support land use planning
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 competition has begun - proposals were due September 30. Between October 1st and October 22nd, the proposals were reviewed by an international group of twelve Experts and were evaluated by the Jury Panel. The Competing Teams that qualified to enter the GEO-LDN technology innovation Competition presented their initial concepts for a Land Degradation Neutrality software solution at the Virtual Pitch event on October 30th - the recordings are available: session 1 and session 2.
The Jury Panel evaluated the Virtual Pitch entries and five Teams were selected to present the beta version of their tools at the Sneak Preview Workshop on December 10th, 2020.
The Jury evaluated the Sneak Preview entries and selected the three finalist Teams - these are Teams F, L and N. The finalist Teams demonstrated their tool-prototypes live during the Demonstration session on March 9th, 2021 - the session’s recording is available in the Resources webpage. The Jury will now evaluate each entry and come to a final decision during a consensus meeting.
The winning Team has been announced! Congratulations to the LUP4LDN Team! Thank you to all the teams for demonstrating their commitment to solving one of the world’s greatest environmental challenges, and specially to the three finalist Teams for their outstanding engagement!
The Competition’s Award Ceremony took place on March 19th, immediately after the closure of the UNCCD’s Committee for the Review of the Implementation of the Convention (CRIC 19), being held online between 15 and 19 March 2021. During the Ceremony, the Delegates of twenty Parties to the UNCCD expressed immediate interest in learning more about the tool, its application and supporting its testing and further development. The recording of the session is available via the Resources webpage.
The challenge
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.
Because land degradation is driven by many competing social, economic and environmental demands for land resources, the tool also needs to have the capacity to analyze trade-offs in ecosystem services. Specific ecosystem services will have different values in different places to different stakeholders, and human values may change over time. Where decisions involve trade-offs between ecosystem services, or between environmental and social goals, transparent participatory processes should be applied to prioritise between different ecosystem services, based on needs and goals of the stakeholders.
The overall aim is that that the tool will not only be useful (i.e. data and information meet information needs) and usable (i.e. the tool allows easy access) but that it will also be used. Therefore, it is important not to design for the users but to design with the users from the very beginning, in line with the Principles for Digital Development. Users must be actively involved in the co-design and development of the prototype, which should serve a concrete use case on the ground. Competitors should demonstrate that their solution works, in the context of this concrete use case and corresponding data sets. Further details on these requirements are listed in the competition rules.
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.”
Timeline
Current results
Provenance of participants: number of countries of origin per region
23 proposals received
18 complete proposals reviewed
7 proposals qualified
5 proposals awarded seed funding
Participants from 36 different Countries.
Teams with members from different countries:
40% of all teams
57% of the qualified teams.
Find partners and connect with other teams
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 and at least one representative of a (sub-)national stakeholder group (i.e. data and tool user).
To facilitate building successful teams, the organizers will support a matching process to aid individuals interested in applying that have not already identified a consortium.
Visit the Competition’s discussion topics in the GEO-LDN Forum to connect with partners and to build a strong consortium!
Check back soon for new cooperation opportunities.