The Board of the Green Climate Fund (GCF) today approved an $11.8 million project to support zero-deforestation cocoa production in Côte d’Ivoire, to be implemented by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in collaboration with the country’s Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development (MINEDD). The project is the first REDD+ proposal in Africa and globally to be approved under the GCF’s Simplified Approval Process Pilot Scheme (SAP). It is also the first GCF funding proposal approved for FAO in Africa. Out of the $11.8 million, the project will receive $0.5 million in co-financing from the Global Environment...

Youth can have a catalytic role in charting a new course for forests and climate action under the Paris Agreement. Yet, they are often overlooked. The theme of the International Youth Day 2020, “Youth Engagement for Global Action” seeks to highlight the ways in which the engagement of young people at the local, national and global levels is enriching national and multilateral institutions and processes. Providing youth with the necessary forestry skills, education, and access to technology, can play a key role in enabling and accelerating inputs from youth – which is desperately needed for forest and climate action. On 15...

Since March 2020, we have witnessed numerous parallels between COVID-19 and the climate crisis, including a lack of cohesive, coordinated global intervention and a laissez-faire response to a global emergency. Inadequate government response to the pandemic has led to preventable deaths from a highly contagious virus, just as inadequate government responses to the climate crisis could result in exacerbated effects by drought, fires or flooding as well as rising food insecurity. These risks are fast approaching their tipping points. COVID-19 has inundated our lives with numbers and social media updates to the point of statistical overload, a phenomenon WHO refers to as an...

Join our webinar “Knowledge sharing webinar on national forest monitoring in Southeast Asia: Presentation of the Bangladesh Forest Inventory”.   Date: 09 August 2020 Time: 10.30 am, Dhaka time (GMT+6) Platform: Zoom Access: https://fao.zoom.us/j/96239073922 (Passcode: 085261)   Forests are essential in achieving almost all SDGs, particularly in Bangladesh where forests play a critical role in reducing the impacts of natural disasters on people’s livelihoods and the national economy in general. In 2015, Bangladesh Forest Department with technical support from FAO and SilvaCarbon and financial support from the USAID, launched the Bangladesh Forest Inventory (BFI), which aims to be a permanent process of national tree and forest inventory...

Halting deforestation is a critical element in addressing climate change. The way we manage our forests also has a direct impact on the production of our food and food security. The COVID-19 crisis is further increasing pressures on forest resources. Evidence is needed to guide public and individual decisions on addressing these challenges. Two recent flagship reports published by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the Global Forest Resources Assessment 2020 (FRA) and the State of the World’s Forests (SOFO 2020) present evidence about the state of the world’s forest resources and the policy challenges ahead. Key...