LAUSR

Abstract Specific guidelines are needed to overcome dichotomous classifications of lands into degraded or not for leveraging the Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) concept. Overlooking degrading lands or those at risk of degradation can block LDN. Therefore, this paper proposes a detailed land classification method, and complements LDN with an indicator α (wildfires, landslides and insights on aridity). Indicator α taps the rarely studied LDN-natural hazards nexus. For separating degrading, degraded and non-degraded lands, twelve categories were defined, and indicators were then established. Subsequently, a land potential-hazard informed LDN intervention was planned. These methods target sub-national scales via the Lebanese/Mediterranean Aley district. Findings first revealed that Aley's land cover developed without considering land potential or hazard potentiality. Second, land status categories are distributed as 65% stable (of which 20.18 are lightly used), 8.14% non-degraded (adequately used, recovered and improving), 13.67% degraded, and 13.13% at risk of degradation. However, the district risks shifting towards less healthy land states due to unplanned development and natural hazards inconsideration. Accordingly, the LDN intervention targeted the stable/lightly used, at risk of degradation-/lightly used, overused and lightly used lands for optimization. This approach shifted 33.33% of Aley to adequately used lands, increasing the latter from 8.05% to 41.38%.