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Pathways to forest data transparency: Best practices from national forest monitoring to support climate action











FAO. 2024. Pathways to forest data transparency: Best practices from national forest monitoring to support climate action. Rome. 



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    This is the first document in a series of case studies by member countries of the Thematic Working Group on Agriculture, Food Security and Land Use (TWG), under the NDC-Partnership. The aim is to present what countries are doing to tackle climate change and implement their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). This case study shares the experience of how Zimbabwe developed a climate-smart agriculture (CSA) manual aimed for university and professional level agricultural education, which directly contributes to the achievement of their NDC.
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    This paper reviews how countries are benefiting from technical innovations in their monitoring and reporting of forest-related emissions and removals to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).Forests play an important role in climate action. They are often mentioned in nationally determined contributions (NDCs) with targets conditional on international climate finance. Despite countries reporting forest-related emission reductions (ERs) of 14.0 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e) to the UNFCCC, results-based finance for ERs has been limited. Nonetheless, more robust estimation methods have increasingly enabled accessing new sources of climate finance, including from the private sector. As such, technological solutions and capacity development for ER reporting can act as an engine that enables better resource management and improved access to climate finance.There has been enormous technological progress over the last decade, allowing increasingly robust forest dynamic assessments. Recent UNFCCC reference level submissions reveal an increased use of satellite imagery with higher spatial and temporal resolution: initial submissions relied entirely on Landsat imagery; after 2022, 100 percent used Sentinel and 50 percent used Planet imagery. Open source solutions are widely used by countries: 89 percent of countries reporting a reference level to the UNFCCC have used Open Foris, a set of free and open source solutions and platforms developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) for accessing and analysing data. Improvements in forest monitoring are crucial to better understand forests’ contribution to climate change mitigation and unlock climate finance.
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    FAO carries out this mandate and seeks to assist countries and the world community by providing relevant, timely, realistic, reliable and useful information for application in reviewing policies, promoting multilateral cooperation and taking appropriate investment actions for the sustainable management of forest resources; and to support international cooperation in harmonizing and sharing multi-country forest resource information in common formats. In this context, the need for voluntary guidel ines on forest monitoring has emerged. It is clear that voluntary guidelines will not solve the lack of information; however it is the key for harmonization and to ensure some degree of reliability of the information. The guidelines aim to present a general framework to compile good practice principles, methodologies and tools for planning and implementing a multi-objective national forest inventory as one of the crucial objectives to allow for collection and provision of timely, comparable and consistent forest related information to help decision makers and inventory experts to establish long-term forest monitoring systems which are grounded in sound practice and defensible scientific rigor taking in consideration the requirements from international reporting requirements (for example for REDD+ or biodiversity).

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