To understand recent changes in the Earth system, the scientific community and decision-makers need quantitative, spatially explicit data on how land cover has been changed by human use over recent years and how it will be changed in the near future. The Corine Land Cover (CLC) methodology provides policymakers with environmental data on land use and land cover for planning and management and to reconcile land use with environmental concerns. 

Land is a finite resource: how it is used constitutes one of the principal drivers of environmental change and has significant impacts on ecosystems and quality of life. In extreme cases, such changes might lead to unhealthy and degraded land.

The pilot project on the CLC methodology in Ukraine is a step towards facilitating access to and use of the spatial data required for SEIS implementation. This pilot allows direct links to programmes at the European level, namely the just completed update of the CLC2018 layers in the EEA’s 39 member and cooperating countries (as at 2018) and services provided through the Copernicus programme.

Experts from the Ministry of Energy and Environmental Protection of Ukraine, the State Space Agency of Ukraine and other institutions and organisations took part in two training courses delivered by the European Topic Centre on Urban, Land and Soil Systems (ETC/ULS) in 2018-2019. Experts shared their experiences of the CLC methodology, discussed the pilot’s implementation and practised using the InterChange software tool.

The EEA experts together with the Ukrainian national implementation team (National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine and the company Agroresurssystemy) agreed on an area in the western and southern suburbs of Kyiv as the mapping area. Time series of high-resolution satellite images taken by the European Space Agency (ESA) Sentinel-2 satellite in 2017 and 2018 were made available for the project, while a Landsat ETM image taken in 2001 was used for mapping changes. InterChange software was adapted to map the CLC pilot area.

The national experts in Ukraine finalised the CLC pilot project. This included creating the CLC2018 status layer, revising the status layer based on the verification by ETC/ULS experts and mapping the layer of CLC changes between 2001 and 2018. Finally, a geographical information system (GIS)-based generation provided the backdated CLC2000 status layer.

Central and local authorities received the information and could draw conclusions about land use, changes and the environmental impact of land use.