GFOI’s partner the Food and Agriculture Organization announces a new collaboration with the Global Environment Facility (GEF) to help countries generate reliable and accessible forest data, in line with the Paris Agreement’s enhanced transparency requirements.

The project will strengthen the institutional and technical capacities of developing countries to collect, analyze and disseminate forest and land-use change data. This information is needed to track progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as well as measure the success of climate change-mitigation and adaptation measures.

"Building global capacity to increase transparency in the forest sector (CBIT-Forest)” is one of the four global projects approved under the GEF’s Capacity Building Initiative for Transparency (CBIT) trust fund. It will target a large group of countries, including the 185 countries and territories that are part of the global network of national correspondents to the FAO’s Global Forest Resources Assessment (FRA).

The activities will be implemented over two years by the FAO’s FRA and National Forest Monitoring teams and include the upgrade of the FRA 2020 reporting platform, the organization of workshops across Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, the development of an e-learning course on transparency in the forest sector as well as of ad hoc communications materials.

This important agreement adds to the ongoing forms of capacity building support in forest-monitoring provided by FAO and other GFOI partners to countries to advance in forest monitoring and meet international reporting requirements.

FAO will work closely with the GFOI and other partners, including the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the CBIT Global Coordination Platform, to ensure coordination and collaboration with existing activities.

Check out the press release and follow the project website for updates on the project implementation. A project one-pager is also available here.