FAO has a basic responsibility to provide global information on food, nutrition, agriculture, fisheries and forestry. Forest Resource Assessment (FRA) has been a part of this normative work of FAO since 1947. The FRA is a five decade old well-established arrangement of FAO that enables member countries to actively participate in the assessment and provide relevant national information. It publishes results that are generally accepted as the global baseline and builds capacities of participating countries in forest resource assessment. The latest assessment at year 2000 (FRA 2000)2 presented a broad and transparent picture of forest resources in all countries. In addition to factual findings and analyses, FRA 2000 drew an important conclusion that knowledge and information on forests remain unsatisfactory in most countries.
Following the mandate from COFO and the recommendation and advice provided by the Expert consultations and the Advisory Group3,4, FRA is attempting to fill the information gaps through “Support to National Forest Assessments”. FRA is evolving and developing global FRA 2005 around the framework of “Thematic Areas” common among all the nine regional processes on C&I for SFM for international reporting and is seeking synergies with other forest-related processes that require national information, in particular the Conventions on Climate Change and Biological Diversity. FRA 2005 is broadening its scope to serve as one of unified reporting mechanisms to reduce reporting burden of countries especially when forest-related processes, agreements and conventions are continually increasing their demand of national information for policy development, implementation and monitoring. The breadth of such information requests has grown into a full review of goods and services from forests and trees, including review of environmental sustainability and contribution to cross-sectoral benefits like the alleviation of poverty.
To implement the above, FRA is institutionalising and reinforcing the network of its national correspondents, as they continue to be the backbone of the global FRA programme. In doing so, the FRA recently requested countries to officially nominate their National Correspondents (NCs) to global FRA and received an overwhelming and immediate response from more than 120 countries to its. Further, FRA organised a one week training for National Correspondents during November (17th to 21st, 2003) to involve them from the very beginning into its FRA 2005 process and on the way build their capacities. The training aimed to explain documents and reporting formats to NCs and to train them in transforming and harmonising their national data to serve as input to global FRA.
The “NCs Training” was an unique effort in the five decade long history of FRA and more than 100 countries actively participated in it. This has yielded very positive and encouraging results and has also served to launch the FRA 2005 global activities.
Broadly speaking, the participating countries supported the scope, contents and format of FRA 2005 which builds on a core of sixteen global reporting tables and an optional element of thematic reporting. Expect for some countries, that are members of Pan-European and Montreal C&I process which have recently published their C&I report, most of the countries were willing to contribute to the thematic reporting under FRA 2005. They expressed their need to build national capacities in order to satisfy enhanced and broadened demand of national information. They requested for more detailed guidelines with examples to provide right and better quality information. All countries expressed their desire to reduce the burden of reporting and to have an unified, consistent and stable reporting mechanism.
During training session, almost all countries expressed high expectations from FRA programme that includes providing consistency and stability over time in reporting requirements, harmonizing international reporting across processes, lending political and technical support to NCs, and establishing an “Electronic Forum” to serve as “Help Line” and as an “ Information Center”.
Many countries wanted FRA to take lead of international reporting and serve as an interface between country and the International Processes. They also perceived that FRA promotes the coordination between various national institutions, enables synergy between NCs & focal points of C&I, and that it may finally lead to a forest related “Unified International Reporting System”. All countries stressed the need for an enhanced and more active role of FAO’s “Regional Forestry Commissions” and “Regional Offices” in the FRA process particularly in facilitation and coordination among national regional activities, mobilization of resources to implement FRA, the organization of Regional Workshops and the development of “Regional Group of Experts”.
Finally, a very important output of this meeting was development of an integrated work plan of regional and national activities for 2004 that will enable participating countries to provide their national data inputs to global FRA well in time.
2 FAO 2001. Global Forest Resources Assessment 2000 - Main report. Forestry Paper 140 www.fao.org/forestry/fra2000report
3 Kotka IV Expert Consultation 1-5 July 2002, Kotka, Finland www.fao.org/forestry/Kotka4
4 FRA Advisory Group www.fao.org/forestry/fra-ag
