This week, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) publicly released a wealth of learning materials about forest monitoring under the Paris Agreement. By meeting the needs of many professionals to learn at their own pace, this initiative will increase awareness about the key role played by forests to achieve international climate goals.    Forests act as carbon sinks, by removing greenhouse gas emissions from the atmosphere, and thus they play an important role in meeting climate change mitigation goals. The Paris Agreement aims to limit global temperature rise to less than 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. The...

On 17 November 2021, join the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) for the international, technical webinar, “Mind the gap: addressing National Forest Inventory capacity needs to support climate action.”   Date: 17 November 2021  Time: 14:30 (Rome) Register in advance here        Objectives:   Highlight the importance of national forest monitoring systems (NFMS) and National Forest Inventories to support climate action.   Share knowledge, experience and capacity needs for the implementation of forest monitoring from Guatemala and Liberia.    Launch of FAO’s national forest inventory (NFI) online training modules to facilitate NFIs design and implementation and support forest data analysis for policy and decision-making.  Agenda and Speakers:   Welcoming remarks: Fabio Picinich, FAO eLearning Academy; Emily Donegan, moderator (FAO)   Introductory...

Thanks to financial support from UN-REDD, a new platform has been added to the Open Foris family. Launched on 7 July, Arena is an open-source technical solution enabling forest data collection, storage, management and analysis. Open Foris is a suite of open-source solutions that can be tailored to fit user’s needs, from field data collection to satellite image classification. With the addition of this new platform, the analysis and reporting of forest data is more efficient and flexible than ever before. Open Foris Arena eases the management of field data, as it provides users with the ability to fully customize...

This week a group of international experts and practitioners met virtually during a global knowledge sharing webinar “Forest data and free open-source solutions for Climate Action”. This event focused on the ways in which forest monitoring supports climate action, and it further highlighted country experiences from Papua New Guinea and Ghana and presented FAO’s newest Open Foris tool for collecting and analyzing forest data. Organized within the framework of FAO/GEF project “Building global capacity to increase transparency in the forest sector (CBIT-Forest),” the online session brought together 361 participants from across 5 continents. Participation mostly stemmed from academia and government, but also included...

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations is launching its third edition of the massive open online course (MOOC) “Forests and Transparency under the Paris Agreement.” Developed under the project “Building Global Capacity to Increase Transparency in the Forest sector (CBIT-Forest),” in collaboration with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). This course further explores the connections between aspects of the enhanced transparency framework (ETF) of the Paris Agreement, and the collection, analysis and dissemination of reliable and transparent forest information. The MOOC will teach participants that the support needed to maintain a sustainable National Forest Monitoring System (NFMS) also enables countries to meet the reporting requirements of the ETF.   Course timeline: 20...