One of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that gives focus on the environmental protection is SDG 15, called Life on Land. The United Nations (UN) has defined 12 targets and 14 indicators for SDG 15 which gives importance on the terrestrial biodiversity conversation. High biodiversity is an indicator of a healthy ecosystem, which is directly linked to human health. SDG 15 provides a set of targets and indicators that would help monitor and assess the progress in attaining a sustainably managed forest, halting and reversing land and habitat degradation, and stopping biodiversity loss. As of 2022, almost all indicators under SDG 15 are classified as Tier I globally. However, in the Philippines, as of 2020, only a few indicators have attained a Tier I classification at the national monitoring with the remaining indicators tagged as either Tier II or Tier III. For this reason, a scoping research study was undertaken as a precursor to a methodological research study, to identify which among the indicators will be prioritized for the generation of baseline estimates. Literature review, consultation meetings with various stakeholders, and inputs from the technical consultants served as the backbone of the scoping research study. Prioritization of indicators were based on several criteria, namely (a) global and national tier classification; (b) readiness of the responsible agency; (c) alignment of the available concepts and definitions at the national level with the global definition; (d) availability of data; (e) frequency of data collection/generation; (f) availability of methodology; and, (g) ease of resolving data gaps. As a result, three indicators, namely, SDG 15.3.1 (Proportion of land that is degraded over total land area), 15.4.1 (Coverage by protected areas of important sites for mountain biodiversity), and 15.4.2 (Mountain Green Cover Index) were identified to have the potential to pursue methodological research study in the immediate term.

Keywords:environmental protection, biodiversity, data gaps

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