Overview

©FAO/Giulio Napolitano
©FAO/Vasily Maksimov

The Global Forest Observations Initiative (GFOI) is an informal partnership to coordinate international support to developing countries on forest monitoring and greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting for the purposes of REDD+ and related forums.

Through collaborative action, GFOI partners seek to accelerate developing country progress in improved forest monitoring and GHG accounting.

Partners coordinate their activities under four interlinked GFOI components, which together make it possible to provide a more holistic and coherent package of support to developing countries than any one international partner could provide alone.

GFOI is the product of the collaborative actions of its partners. Specifically GFOI activities include:

  • Facilitating country-led assessments of their forest monitoring needs and gaps
  • Harmonized work planning to address country-identified priorities 
  • Collaborative implementation of forest monitoring support, including:
  • Complementary and consistent capacity building 
  • Development and dissemination of user friendly guidance for REDD+ 
  • Supporting the availability and accessibility of remote-sensing data and other key datasets and tools 
  • Coordinating research and development (R&D) activities to fill knowledge gaps, address obstacles to progress and align the work of the research community with developing-country needs  
  • Fostering a diverse network of experts and practitioners to support developing countries in a targeted and cohesive manner 
  • Facilitating information sharing between partners to avoid duplications and overlap.

 

GFOI is guided by a Leads Group and supported by a secretariat known as the GFOI Office.

The work of the components is overseen by component managers, which are provided by GFOI partners.

See the GFOI Organizational Chart for more details.