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This blog was first published on ClimateLinks on 2 February 2022 and is available here.

With rapidly growing cities, high agricultural demand, and worsening floods and wildfires, mountainous South Asian countries like Nepal must make tough choices about how to use their land – balancing economic growth, disaster mitigation, and the environment.

Now, USAID and NASA’s joint SERVIR programme is working with ICIMOD to develop a new tool to give the region better information for land management – and hopefully, make those choices easier.

Climate change and rapid economic growth are impacting mountain landscapes in the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH) region. Deforestation and urbanization are threatening local ecosystems and making hazards like wildfires, floods, and landslides more common. In this region, local governments often do not have easy access to up-to-date land use and land cover (LULC) maps that are vital to understanding these land cover changes. The insight gained from LULC maps also allows local and national governments to make informed decisions regarding land use management functions like zoning and conservation.

In 2016, scientists at the SERVIR-Mekong hub office in Bangkok, Thailand, began developing a new service to generate yearly LULC maps in South and Southeast Asia. With a network of local partnerships, they co-developed a new service that tailored land cover classifications to better suit local needs.

First launched in 2018, this new service was dubbed the Regional Land Cover Monitoring System (RLCMS), an online tool providing 30 years’ worth of annual land cover data for Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and Myanmar. The RLCMS improved upon previous LULC services by providing higher spatial resolution and standardized land cover classifications that were better suited to international deforestation and emissions reporting efforts. Whereas previous methods only provided LULC maps every few years, RLCMS provides annual maps that give a more detailed historical record of land cover change. Importantly, users can define their own classification criteria and see results at a spatial scale of their choosing, from the entire region down to a subnational level.

“Timely and accurate information on land cover and land use change is a required precondition to the successful implementation of national policies and international agreements towards the goal of balancing economic development and environmental sustainability,” said Peter Potapov, Co-director of the Global Land Analysis and Discovery (GLAD) group at the University of Maryland and part of the NASA Applied Sciences Team who made significant contributions to the development of the RLCMS.

By 2021, SERVIR-HKH, a SERVIR hub implemented by ICIMOD, completed and launched its own RLCMS, building upon lessons learned from the Mekong hub. At that time, an early version of the tool was already being used to help enforce land management policies and support emissions reporting at Nepal’s Forest Research Training Centre (FRTC) since 2018. The process involved defining new land cover classifications and processing almost 20 years of satellite imagery to create a product built around the needs of users in these countries.

“We have made available spatially seamless and temporally consistent land cover datasets for the entire HKH region – possibly the first of its kind for the region,” said Kabir Uddin, Remote Sensing Specialist and LULC Thematic Lead at ICIMOD.

Detailed LULC maps that provide a consistent representation of local landscapes over time enable local land managers to better support efforts like sustainable resource management, regional planning, and disaster mitigation. In regions like the HKH that have rapidly changing land cover needs, quality LULC maps are increasingly valuable.

“The RLCMS will provide a stepping stone for national land management agencies towards national monitoring in support of land use policy implementation and enforcement,” said Potapov.

With climate change and rapidly-growing cities threatening fragile mountain ecosystems, land management decisions in the region can be expected to become more difficult. However, easy access to accurate LULC maps and SERVIR services can help communities, whether in the Mekong or the Himalayas, take some of the pressure off.

To learn more about the HKH RLCMS service, check out:

https://servir.icimod.org/science-applications/regional-land-cover-monitoring-system-for-the-hindu-kush-himalaya/ 

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