The Government of Kenya is in the process of establishing a National REDD+ Programme through the Kenya Forest Service (KFS). Two critical elements of the National REDD+ Programme are forest reference levels and a National Forest Monitoring System. With support from the UN-REDD Programme, this new document describes the steps towards establishing the design of the NFMS and reference levels, through an enumeration and description of required tasks.

The Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the General Secretariat for Environment and Sustainable Development, in collaboration with FAO, organized a workshop to identify information needs to prepare the DRC's first National Forest Inventory (NFI) on 28 February 2017. 

For two weeks in late November and early December 2016, a masters’ level course in MRV for REDD+ was held for Pacific Island countries at the University of Melbourne’s Creswick Campus. The course gathered 26 participants from Fiji, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and the Secretariat for Pacific Communities to provide comprehensive training in the development of measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) for efforts to reduce emissions from deforestation, degradation and related activities (REDD+).

Improved forest monitoring systems, a critical measure on the road to implementing REDD+, have advanced significantly in Sri Lanka with the launch of an online geoportal that will help the country move closer to achieving its development and mitigation targets. The online portal, which includes a wide variety of maps, satellite imagery, and information on a range of protected areas, is designed to be accessible to the public, meeting demands for information that is transparent as well as consistent.

When the UN-REDD Programme intensified its work to address tenure issues within the context of REDD+, the challenge involved more than delivering financial and technical support to partner countries. It soon became evident that many countries, while recognizing that resolution of tenure issues was fundamental to REDD+ success, were nonetheless uneasy about taking the first steps. Particularly in situations where laws and policies governing land are not clear, where rights to land are customary rather than statutory, and where conversion pressures on land are high, the mere mention of tenure in official circles can cause some apprehension.