RESEARCH ARTICLE From land productivity trends to land degradation assessment in Mozambique: Effects of climate, human activities and stakeholder definitions Frédérique Montfort 1,2,3,4,5 | Agnès Bégué 2,3 | Louise Leroux 6,7,8 | Lilian Blanc 4,5 | Valéry Gond 4,5 | Armindo H. Cambule 9 | Ivan A. D. Remane 9 | Clovis Grinand 1 1 N'LAB, Nitidae, Montpellier, France 2 CIRAD, UMR TETIS, F-34398 Montpellier, France 3 TETIS, Univ Montpellier, AgroParisTech, CIRAD, CNRS, IRSTEA, Montpellier, France 4 CIRAD, UPR Forêts et Sociétés, F-34398 Montpellier, France 5 Forêts et Sociétés, Univ Montpellier, CIRAD, Montpellier, France 6 CIRAD, UPR AIDA, Dakar, Senegal 7 AIDA, Univ Montpellier, CIRAD, Montpellier, France 8 Centre de Suivi Ecologique, Dakar, Senegal 9 Faculty of Agronomy and Forest Engineering, Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, Maputo, Mozambique Correspondence Montfort Frédérique, Nitidae, 500 rue Jean- François Breton, Montpellier 34090, France. Email: f.montfort@nitidae.org Funding information Association Nationale de la Recherche et de la Technologie, Grant/Award Number: CIFRE N  2017-0575 Abstract Remote sensing observations such as normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) trends can provide important insights into past and present land condition. However, they do not directly provide comprehensive information about our representation of land degradation and the processes at work. This study aimed to analyze vegetation productivity underlying factors in order to assess land degradation and to highlight the impact of definitions on its quantitative assessment, using Mozambique as case- study. Land productivity change were first analyzed using NDVI time-series (2000–2016), and a two-step framework was then used to understand the main fac- tors of these productivity changes. The impact of land degradation's definition was assessed based on four types of stakeholder, with different priorities in terms of eco- system services. The results show that 25% of the country display a significant land productivity decrease, while only 3% display a land productivity increase. A large part of these land productivity changes (>61% of the decrease, and >98% of the increase) is directly assigned to human activities, such as native forest growth or tree planta- tions (for the increase), or forest degradation, deforestation and loss of grassland pro- ductivity (for the decrease). We showed that the fraction of degraded land varies according to stakeholders' definitions, ranging from 12% to 20% of the Country, much less than the 39% estimated by Tier 1 United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification. This study provides a sound methodological framework for assessing land degradation status that could help stakeholders to design national and locally relevant land degradation mitigation policies or programmes. KEYWORDS land degradation, NDVI time series, RESTREND analysis, land productivity change, factor analysis, Mozambique 1 | INTRODUCTION Land degradation is a widespread and worldwide phenomenon that impacts food security, ecosystem services and human well-being. In the past 5 years, many global and regional initiatives have been launched to halt land degradation and restore land. In the sustainable development goals (SDG) adopted by world leaders in 2015, target 15.3 states “...by 2030, combat desertification, restore degraded land Received: 9 November 2019 Revised: 31 March 2020 Accepted: 25 June 2020 DOI: 10.1002/ldr.3704 Land Degrad Dev. 2020;1–17. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/ldr © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 1