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SEPAL Forest and Land Monitoring for Climate Action

SEPAL in action: Turning satellite data into better forest decisions
22/06/2026

Forests are changing fast, and better decisions depend on reliable information. SEPAL is FAO’s open-source, cloud-based Earth observation platform that...

SEPAL’s goals are to support countries in their efforts to halt deforestation and degradation, and to enhance reforestation and restoration by: 

  • providing a free, open-source and easily accessible platform for efficient geospatial data access, processing and analysis, enabling users to generate forest and land monitoring products without advanced coding skills; 

  • diversifying data discovery and processing options, expanding GeoAI capabilities and developing dedicated SEPAL modules for emerging forest monitoring needs, including UNFCCC reporting, carbon standards, restoration monitoring, fire monitoring, commodity transparency, peatlands and mangroves; and 

  • strengthening national capacity and institutional use of SEPAL within national forest monitoring systems and country-owned measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) workflows, including readiness for the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF).

By March 2026, SEPAL had more than 25,000 active users across 205 countries. Users had created 87,748 analysis recipes, submitted nearly 48,000 computational tasks to cloud processing infrastructure, and generated more than 2.7 million platform interactions. This reach reflects SEPAL’s role as a widely used open-source platform for national forest and land monitoring, supporting government institutions, civil society, researchers and other users to produce geospatial analysis products independently.

Phase 3 will provide methodological foundations for applying geospatial technology to MRV for climate finance and TFFF. It will also support countries in the use of technical solutions and deploy technical assistance on MRV and participation in the TFFF and carbon standards, with a target of eight countries supported through technical assistance on TFFF and forest MRV by 2030. 

SEPAL caters to specific monitoring and reporting needs through dedicated modules, workflows and recipes, including SE.PLAN for spatially explicit forest restoration planning, SE.PAFE for real-time fire monitoring, and BFAST-GPU for dense, large-area time-series analyses. Under Phase 3, SEPAL will further develop thematic workflows and modules for UNFCCC and Paris Agreement reporting, TFFF and carbon standards such as ART-TREES, forest and ecosystem restoration monitoring, fire risk and burned-area assessment, commodity transparency, and peatland and mangrove monitoring. 

 SEPAL is based on the following key principles: 

inclusiveness and open access;

data democratization and country ownership;

operational results for national reporting and decision-making;

innovation through GeoAI, high-resolution data and evolving geospatial methods; and 

long-term sustainability through open-source tools, training and diversified data and processing options.

SEPAL contributes to:   

  1. FAO’s Better Environment and Better Production priorities, especially climate change mitigation and adaptation, digital agriculture, biodiversity and ecosystem services, and inclusive land governance; 
  2. FAO accelerators on Technology, Innovation and Data through cloud-native, open-source geospatial infrastructure; 
  3. SDG 13 on Climate Action, SDG 15 on Life on Land, and partnerships that strengthen implementation capacity; 
  4. The implementation of the Paris Agreement, including transparent forest-related reporting, access to results-based climate finance and readiness for emerging forest finance mechanisms such as the TFFF; and 
  5. National forest monitoring systems that are credible, transparent, locally owned and sustained beyond project support. 
Mid-term review: System for Earth Observation Data Access, Processing and Analysis for Land Monitoring (SEPAL) October 2021–June 2025
06/08/2026

This mid-term review (MTR) assesses the progress of Phase 2 of the System for Earth Observation Data Access, Processing and Analysis for Land Monitoring...

Developing an Innovative Peatlands Monitoring System in Indonesia
23/03/2021

Peatlands cover only 3 percent of global land area but store nearly 30 percent of the world’s soil carbon, and may contain twice as much carbon as the...

Integration of SEPAL into Uganda's National Forest Monitoring System
13/08/2024

This case study summarizes the experience of the use of System for Earth Observation Data Access, Processing and Analysis for Land Monitoring (SEPAL)...