Insights on the historical and emerging global land cover changes: The case of ESA-CCI-LC datasets

Global land cover (LC) mapping has been the main source of monitoring our global landscapes for a wide range of applications e.g., food production estimation, urbanization, deforestation, climate change studies, air/soil/water pollution, and CO ₂ emission. Several initiatives and organizations have attempted to generate global LC maps using remote sensing data and in-situ data. Noteworthy examples include IGBP-DISCover, GlobeCover 2009, FAO, GLC 2000, MODIS, GlobeLand30. While researchers including climate change scientists require fine LC maps in terms of spatial resolution and temporal coverage for continuous monitoring of the planet, these datasets lack of fulfilling this goal. Understanding the trend of LC changes as well as the direction of future changes at global level is of vital importance to a broad spectrum of stakeholders, and essential for addressing the sustainable development goals worldwide. European Space Agency has recently released its climate change initiative's LC dataset called CCI-LC, which aims at achieving this ambition with 300 m spatial resolution and 24-year continuous temporal coverage within 1992–2015. The main objective of this study is to quantify the global land changes within this timeframe and also to predict the future land change by 2050 in order to gain a global picture of our future planet. This is a timely objective since more than ever scientists, environmentalist, and governors require to know how our future will look like and how they can achieve the goals of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) i.e., the Paris Agreement. The achieved results reveal massive land changes of different kinds e.g., deforestation, urbanization, desertification, forestry, water and ice shrinkage across different continents. The employed predictive modelling for year 2030 and 2050 messages dramatic changes among different LC types. Our discussions and conclusive comments can guide policy-makers, environmental planners, ecosystem services providers and climate change researchers to gain finer insights about our planet by 2050. Future research direction draws attention for investigating the underlying causes and consequences on our ecosystems and human population.