Country-Led Planning at the GFOI Plenary 2025: Strengthening country leadership for sustainable forest monitoring

At the Global Forest Observations Initiative (GFOI) Plenary 2025 in Bali, Indonesia, the Country-Led Planning (CLP) Programme of Support had a standout presence. This included two flagship occasions: the first was a mini Connect & Reflect forum to align national forest monitoring systems (NFMSs) with national policy priorities on 20 October 2025. This was complimented by the CLP side event “Connecting Agendas through Country-Led Planning: Challenges and opportunities for institutionalizing national forest monitoring systems across global commitments” on 23 October. Both spaces reinforced a clear message: countries are moving from project-driven monitoring to strategic, institutionally embedded NFMSs that respond to national planning, governance and development priorities.

Mini connect & reflect forum: Highlights

Ten CLP partner countries – Belize, Cambodia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Fiji, Guatemala, Kenya, Nigeria, Peru, Viet Nam and Zambia – shared concrete insights on anchoring NFMSs in domestic priorities.

Key moments from the discussion:

• NFMSs as powerful decision-making engines: Multiple countries stated that when NFMSs serve land-use regulation, enforcement and development planning (not just REDD+), they become political assets rather than technical side projects.
  
• Institutional culture over hardware: Delegates converged on a powerful point: Technology is not the bottleneck, coordination and mandates are. Fragmented custodianship often blocks progress more than data gaps.
  
• Local actors reshape national systems: Experiences from the countries showed that community and subnational participation does not just enrich data; it strengthens legitimacy and political traction.

CLP side event: Highlights

The CLP side event brought together Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia, Mozambique, Zambia and global partners (the World Bank, the government of the United Kindom, and the government of Norway) to explore how NFMSs can bridge multiple agendas.

Key moments from the discussion:

• Political visibility of forests cuts both ways: Colombia noted that when forests become politically visible, they gain priority while also entering the arena of political tension. The call to action is to build systems strong enough to outlast politics.
• Data is democracy: Brazil’s intervention underscored that transparency (making all methodological and spatial data open) creates public trust and protects NFMSs from political cycles.
• A shift in donor logic: The World Bank pushed a bold idea: the era of short, reactive projects must end; CLP signals a pivot toward long-term, country-owned planning where donors align to national roadmaps.

What comes next?

Looking ahead, countries also recognized a set of shared challenges that will require deeper collective work within the CLP process: improving interinstitutional coordination and data governance; reconciling domestic policy priorities with international reporting demands; securing long-term financing beyond project cycles; strengthening the legal and policy anchoring of NFMS functions; harmonizing definitions and interoperability standards; ensuring that data are not only produced but actively used across sectors; and building stable institutional capacities that can withstand political turnover. These are the issues that will guide the next phase of CLP engagement, as countries and partners work to embed NFMSs firmly within governance structures and move from technical progress to lasting institutional transformation.