Ecuador strengthens its national forest monitoring system

Quito – The Ministry of Environment, Water and Ecological Transition of Ecuador (Ministerio del Ambiente, Agua y Transición Ecológica del Ecuador, MAATE in Spanish), through the national forest monitoring system (NFMS), is tasked with collecting and generating periodic information to assess the management of forests, other natural ecosystems, and their associated biodiversity. This information is essential for determining the conservation status of the national forest heritage and for facilitating the production of national and international reports on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions related to land-use change and forestry (https://snmb.ambiente.gob.ec/snmb).

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), through the global project “Building global capacity to increase transparency in the forest sector (CBIT-Forest)”, provides technical assistance to improve the quality of forest sector information and to strengthen national forest monitoring systems. As part of this support, the technical team of Ecuador’s NFMS participated on April 3 and 4 in a workshop to introduce and apply the NFMS assessment tool developed by FAO. This tool is based on the Voluntary Guidelines on National Forest Monitoring (VGNFM; FAO, 2017) and is further supported by resources from the REDDcompass of the Global Forest Observations Initiative (GFOI).

This tool, developed under the CBIT-Forest project with funding from the Global Environment Facility (GEF), enables a comprehensive analysis of forest monitoring capacity. It covers institutional arrangements, measurement and estimation, reporting, and verification, in support of climate transparency.

Although Ecuador’s NFMS has made significant progress in its institutionalization process, the application of the tool enabled the team to carry out a thorough diagnosis of its various components and to identify institutional gaps, needs, and shortcomings. This will help strengthen and improve the NFMS, with the aim of defining an action plan focused on the elements that require enhancement.

The NFMS evaluation workshop in Ecuador allowed participating technicians and stakeholders to engage in a critical and reflective exercise on the current state of the system, identifying both its progress and its challenges. As a result, there was consensus on the need to strengthen the institutionalization of the NFMS and to lay the groundwork for defining priority actions that will lead to a more robust system. Among the most relevant actions identified are the following:

1. Updating the legal framework that supports the NFMS as an official State entity is key, ensuring its sustainable financing through the national budget. It is also necessary to strengthen strategic partnerships, technical dialogue spaces, and collaboration networks to improve coordination and articulation of forest monitoring efforts.
2. Strengthening NFMS procedures and protocols is essential for statistical analysis of satellite and field data, improving quality control, integrating both data types using validated methodologies, and responding to the information needs of external stakeholders.
3. To enhance reporting and verification, it is proposed to establish an inter-institutional coordination mechanism with clear roles, promote continuous staff training, set up a secure and accessible national data repository, and improve communication through reports tailored to different audiences.