Representatives from Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Paraguay, Peru and from a number of international GFOI partners will gather together for the 16^th GFOI Regional Workshop in the Americas from 21 to 24 January 2020 at the United States Geological Survey (USGS) Fort Collins Science Center (FORT).

The goal of the workshop is to review how data produced for results-based payments for REDD+ is assisting forested countries in Latin America to inform management and policy decisions for sustainable development and carbon emissions reduction. Moreover, country representatives will share their experience on how different governmental institutions are collecting, analysing and exchanging this data and will discuss their efforts to move towards sustainable integrated systems.

The USGS SilvaCarbon programme is organizing the event in cooperation with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) SERVIR, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the United Nations Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (UN-REDD), and the U.S. Forest Service (USFS).

In the past years, GFOI partners including the FAO, the NASA, and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) have collaborated with tropical countries through international assistance programmes such as SilvaCarbon and SERVIR to homogenize methods and data for greenhouse gas inventories and national REDD+ monitoring reporting and verification systems.

It is now important for countries to optimize data generation for different reporting processes, including for the REDD+, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and the National Determined Contributions (NDC) under the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.

The four-day workshop will help GFOI partners to design capacity building programmes targeted to strengthen data flow among national institutions in charge of different processes. An outcome document will be developed for inclusion in the GFOI methods and guidance.

This work is also contributing to the Earth Observations for the Sustainable Development Goals (EO4SDG) Initiative promoted by the Group on Earth Observations (GEO).

For more information and the Agenda of the workshop read: http://eo4sdg.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Agenda_WorkshopFortCollins_Final.pdf