The #HowtoLDN Series highlights the efforts of intersectoral country teams to implement their roadmaps towards Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN). Supported by the GEO-LDN Flagship since the Global Dialogue Forum 2023 in South Africa, the series opens with Team Nigeria.

Background

About 24% of Nigeria’s land area is affected by desertification, impacting regions that are crucial for livestock and agricultural production and home to more than 40 million people.

Enhancing Community Resilience by
mitigating Land Degradation

To combat this, Nigeria has committed to restoring 19 million hectares of degraded land and forests by 2030. Leveraging geospatial data for sustainable land-use planning is a key strategy to halt land degradation and ensure the long-term, sustainable use of land resources in Nigeria.

#HowtoLDN Use Case from Team Nigeria

On their journey towards achieving Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN), the country team in Nigeria has developed a roadmap for 2024. The first step focused on a community assessment at a designated land degradation hotspot in the Amba Community, Nasarawa State, where the team carried out ground truthing and engaged directly with community members.

With community support, the next steps include generating LDN datasets, developing a policy and regulatory framework, providing capacity-building training, and ultimately initiating the restoration phase. Learn more about Nigeria’s LDN roadmap here.

How the GEO-LDN Flagship supported Team Nigeria

With support from the GEO-LDN Flagship, Nigeria’s intersectoral country team developed a questionnaire for a participatory expert assessment of land degradation in the Amba Community. The assessment focuses on identifying the type, causes and extent of degradation, as well as the current land-use system.

Based on the WOCAT LADA Mapping Questionnaire (QM), the Nigeria team used the KoboCollect tool for data collection during the assessment. With support from GEO-LDN Working Group Decision Support, the team adapted an FAO–WOCAT LDN Decision Support System, built on a Google Earth Engine (GEE) app, to analyse the field data together with existing datasets on land cover and land degradation, enabling a convergence of evidence.

Discover Team Nigeria in the following infographic here:

For more information, please see the team country’s poster presented at UNCCP COP16 in Riyadh in December 2024 and check our #12 GEO-LDN Online Seminar – GEO-LDN from October 2025 in which the team presented their use case.

In partnership with:

Apacheta
Federal Ministry of Environment – Department of Desertification, Land Degradation and Drought Management
Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data
International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Society (IFRC)
National Space Research and Development Agency
Sustainability and Conservation Education for Rural Areas (SCERA)
University Bern
University of Calabar, Nigeria
World Overview of Conservation Approaches and Technologies (WOCAT)