The United National Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), at the request of the member nations and the world community, regularly reports on the world’s forest resources through its Forest Resources Assessment Programme (FRA). FRA is now executing the Global Forest Resources Assessment 2000 (FRA 2000). Reliable information on forest change (both negative and positive changes) and its trends has been widely recognised as indispensable for ensuring the sustainable management of the world’s forests.
The purpose of this paper is to (a) describe the data and methods used to complete past and current Forest Resource Assessments, and (b) to propose a follow-on continuous world forest survey system to provide FRA products in future years. This paper is based on a background document (Paivinen and Gillespie 2000) and on the results of an Expert Advisory Meeting on FRA 2000 held in Rome, Italy on March 6-10, 2000.
