Land Cover and Land Use Indicators

This paper identifies opportunities to refine OECD’s indicators of land cover and land use and theirregular production for all OECD and G20 countries. A comprehensive review is conducted of the availabledatasets at the global, regional and national levels, including data derived from remote sensing as well asthose complemented with administrative and survey data. The datasets are assessed in terms of theirgeographic coverage, periodicity, spatial resolution, data reliability and comparability. The paper discussesthe potential use of such datasets for the production of indicators that are harmonised across countries andover time. It is found that data on land cover are widely available and that many OECD countries havegood-quality national land cover datasets, in some cases consistently over time. However, considerabledifferences have been found among the land cover products reviewed in terms of their geographiccoverage, spatial, temporal and thematic resolution. For eight countries, no country- or region-specific datacould be found (including Israel, Korea, Colombia, Costa Rica, India, Indonesia, the Russian Federationand Saudi Arabia). On the other hand, data on land use seem to be much scarcer, available only forAustralia, European countries, Japan and the United States. The paper concludes with a discussion ofselection guidelines for, and examples of, potentially suitable datasets in terms of their geographiccoverage and the temporal, spatial and thematic resolution.

OECD Green Growth Papers

Land Cover and Land Use Indicators

Review of available data