Resource information
Degraded territory is land which has been damaged by either industrial and other activities or no activities at all to the stage where any economic activity is impossible unless special renewable measures are implemented. One of the aims of sustainable environment resolutions adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 25 September, 2015 was ‘to restore degraded land and to aim to achieve having a world neutral to land degradation’. This is the first worldwide document where universal and comprehensive actions regarding land degradation are provided. The problem has been defined on international and European levels, but also it is a very topical problem in Latvia. Regarding the risks of land degradation and their prevention in Latvia, Land Management Law has come into force on 1 January, 2015. But, despite the law, specific criteria or classification to identify land and soil degradation in Latvia is still not designed or approved, as well as there is no regulation of how to find and evaluate a degree of current land degradation or its possibility while taking into account current and planned types of land use or how to determine land degradation prevention measures. The aim of the study is to develop scientifically based proposals for the identification of land degradation so it would be possible to classify and evaluate land degradation in Latvia, as well as to develop the sequence of gradual prevention of those processes. To achieve this point, information about types and signs of present land degradation has to be summarized. The survey was carried out among senior staff members of competent public institutions and local governments. The survey found out the respondents’ opinion regarding types of land degradation, degraded land territories, their identification and division, storage of information about the maintenance of brownfields.
