Monitoring and mapping the Sustainable Life on Land (SDG15) changes in Europe with freely available data and tools

Europe is a diverse mix of land cover types, that has experienced significant changes over the past decades. For large scale assessments, it is crucial to understand, capture or even quantify such changes. Measuring and monitoring land cover change is crucial because it directly affects multiple sustainability components, including agricultural management, biodiversity, climate stability, and ecosystem services such as water regulation, soil conservation, and carbon sequestration, to name a few. In this work, publicly available data and open-source software, based on satellite imagery techniques, have been used to estimate key relevant parameters such as land cover change, land productivity, and soil Carbon storage. Next, these parameters are connected to the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG)15: By synthesizing them spatially, the indicator SDG15.3.1 was estimated, quantifying the extents of land improvement, stability, and degradation across Europe, from 2010-2020. The results indicate that a significant proportion of land changes remain under a stable "land sustainability" according to the SDG15.3.1 metric, while there are variations in the 'improved' state countries. Degradation-state land changes account for a smaller percentage in most countries, indicating the need for targeted interventions to address land degradation and restore productivity. The code and results produced per country are publicly available.