National Forest Monitoring

The Forest Data Partnership: a collective approach for ending deforestation and accelerating restoration

Governments and companies around the world are pledging to help end deforestation and accelerate restoration in order to avert the worst impacts of climate change, protect against biodiversity loss and safeguard the many benefits of forests to people and nature.  

In order for governments and companies to establish meaningful plans to meet these pledges, and monitor and demonstrate progress, it is essential that all parties have accurate and timely information about forest extent, land use and the drivers of land use change including deforestation. This information needs to be available in a transparent and consistent format so that all parties can compare and collectively assess their progress toward meeting these pledges.  

The Forest Data Partnership aims to halt and reverse forest loss from commodity production by collaboratively improving global monitoring and supply chain tracking and accelerating restoration. It aligns partners around the data and ensures access for stakeholders across sectors to consistent, validated open-source geospatial forest-risk commodity data.  

The Forest Data Partnership will develop a consistent geospatial data ecosystem that will enable all actors — local, government, producers, traders and financiers — to access consistent, open-source, publicly available and validated geospatial data related to forest-risk commodities and restoration. In doing so, the Partnership will facilitate credible and systematic monitoring, verification and disclosure to drive progress in reducing deforestation and restoring degraded lands. 


Action oriented workstreams

Engage stakeholders to participate in the Partnership and communicate needs and lessons learned to create more effective interventions

Align stakeholders to reach consensus around key datasets in the ever-expanding landscape of forest monitoring data and identify critical data gaps

Innovate to build functional consensus around existing data and develop new approaches and novel data where necessary 

Deploy consistent, open-source and validated geospatial data on commodities most linked to deforestation and forest degradation to enable stakeholders to credibly and systematically monitor, verify and disclose progress  

Assess how increased alignment and accessibility can help stakeholders collectively reduce deforestation and improve restoration