Forest monitoring that is tailored to specific countries enables national and local forest policymaking with up-to-date, reliable, transparent and easily accessible information.
Over the last 12 years, capacity development supported by UN-REDD has given rise to unprecedented transparency in terms of country-level forest data, providing countries with the ability to meet international reporting requirements for REDD+ under the enhanced transparency framework of the Paris Agreement.
Since its inception, UN-REDD has supported 45 countries in developing NFMS through national programmes, targeted support or technical assistance strengthening the NFMS pillars of satellite land monitoring systems (SLMS), national forest inventories (NFI), and greenhouse gas inventories.
UN-REDD materials and open-source software were used in 2019 to support the elaboration of NFIs in Bangladesh, Georgia, Honduras, Liberia, Papua New Guinea, Serbia, Sudan, Uganda and Viet Nam, as well as NFI pilots in Cambodia and Myanmar.
The Programme provided technical support for maintaining and developing forest monitoring information systems during 2019 in Bangladesh, Côte d’Ivoire and Zambia, while in Colombia the Programme updated the road map for NFI implementation. For improved dissemination of NFMS information in a transparent way, UN-REDD supported the construction of operational web platforms for Liberia and Sudan. An additional 22 countries have developed and launched operational web platforms for transparently disseminating NFMS information. A total of 18 countries have received direct technical support and have implemented NFIs since UN-REDD began its work, significantly strengthening forest data for national and international needs.
UN-REDD provided support to ground and satellite and data processing through the Open Foris suite of free open-source software tools, with over 20,000 country downloads and installations from 2012 to date. Testing of and training in the Open Foris tools has been carried out with UN- REDD technical assistance in Viet Nam and Zambia. In addition, steady progress has been achieved in the conversion of Open Foris tools into a new cloud-based system. These efforts, made possible by contributions from UN-REDD, will better serve NFMS and related capacities for measurement, reporting and verification (MRV). The new cloud-based system is scheduled to be released in 2020.