Country-Led Planning engagement

Zambia has been actively engaged in the Country Led Planning (CLP) process with the Global Forest Observations Initiative (GFOI) since 2025. Its engagement builds on a long history of collaboration under UN REDD and related initiative, reflecting strong government ownership and readiness for a more formal CLP cycle that focuses on institutionalization, long term financing, and cross sector integration of the National Forest Monitoring System (NFMS).

National Forest Monitoring System

Zambia has a well established but still partially institutionalized NFMS, developed primarily through UN REDD and anchored in the Forestry Department under the Ministry of Green Economy and Environment (MGEE). Core components include repeated Integrated Land Use Assessments (ILUA I and II), decentralized provincial forest monitoring laboratories, national land cover and change mapping, and integration with the national greenhouse gas inventory and United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) reporting.

Key strengths of Zambia’s NFMS include robust technical foundations, long standing national capacity in forest inventories and measurement, reporting and verification (MRV), and a strong REDD+ track record. Zambia has benefited from sustained international support and is increasingly linking NFMS outputs to carbon finance and jurisdictional REDD+ initiatives. The recent Green Economy and Climate Change Act (2024/25) and the National Forestry Policy (2025) provide clear legal and policy mandates for forest monitoring, carbon accounting and climate transparency, thus elevating the NFMS from a REDD+ tool to a national climate information asset.