Letter to the editor: Comments on ‘Proxy global assessment of land degradation’ by Bai et al. (2008)

Abstract

There is an urgent need for a quantitative, repeatable measure of land degradation and remote sensing provides the only viable option at a regional to global scale. It is therefore commendable that Bai et al. (2008) attempted to use remote sensing methods to quantify trends in land degradation across the globe. However, their rationale and methods contain some fatal flaws and thus the results can be very misleading. As this analysis is used by the FAO Land Degradation Assessment in Drylands (LADA) programme to identify ‘hot spots’ of land degradation, the errors in the paper might have serious consequences