On 21 September the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) of Japan and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) concluded an agreement that will help improve the assessment, monitoring and reporting of global and country-level efforts in afforestation and reforestation (A&R) and conservation with a view to enhancing forest carbon stocks.

The project, financed by MAFF with the amount of USD2 million, will span four years. It will allow the FAO Forestry Department to identify, on a global scale, areas best suited for A&R. The project will particularly target countries with the largest areas of forest loss since 1990, as well as support those countries in overcoming technical barriers for enhancement interventions, and improving measurement and reporting of A&R efforts.

“The FAO-Japan partnership has been further strengthened since the Director-General’s visit to Japan in May 2017.  Our strategic talks will continue to facilitate further collaboration on global concerns related to forestry and the SDGs,” explained Mr Hiroto Mitsugi, Assistant Director-General for Forestry, FAO. “Improving the capacity of assessment, monitoring and reporting on forests is an important area of normative work of the FAO Forestry Department. It is one of our advantages and one of the features of FAO.”

“This project fills an important gap between the ambitions of the Paris Agreement toward enhancement of forest carbon stocks, the significant global efforts already underway, and the assessment, monitoring and reporting of these efforts,” added Julian Fox, National Forest Monitoring Team Leader, FAO Forestry Department, responsible for the project implementation.

The Paris Agreement encourages parties to: take action to conserve and enhance forest carbon stocks; implement and support activities relating to reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation and the role of conservation; sustainably manage forests and enhance forest carbon stocks in developing countries (REDD+); limit the global temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels; and avoid the dangerous consequences of climate change. With the Paris Agreement entered into force, parties need to submit Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) outlining ambitious national efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and to monitor and report progress on these efforts to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Globally, there is significant momentum on A&R, such as the Bonn Challenge to restore 350 million hectares of the world’s deforested and degraded lands by 2030, or the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative aiming to bring 100 million hectares of land in Africa into restoration by 2030 (AFR 100). The United Nations Strategic Plan for Forests 2017–2030 (UNSPF) aims to increase forest area globally by 3 percent, or 120 million hectares, as well as to maintain or enhance the world’s forest carbon stocks by 2030. In addition, Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 15.2 directly calls for action to restore degraded forests and substantially increase A&R globally by 2020, while SDG 15.3 aims to restore degraded land and soil, including land affected by desertification, drought and floods, and strive to achieve a land degradation-neutral world by 2030.

In this context, the project funded by Japan will focus on the enhancement of forest stocks by improving the assessment, monitoring and reporting of global and country-level efforts in A&R and conservation. Particularly, technical forest assessment and monitoring approaches will be used to gauge land suitability and mitigation potential for forest carbon stock enhancement as well as support efforts to monitor and report the UNFCCC (REDD+, NDCs) and other goals and targets (Bonn Challenge, AFR 100, UNSPF, SDG 15). Furthermore, the project contributes to the achievement of FAO’s Strategic Objective 2 (SO2) by increasing and improving the provision of goods and services from agriculture, forestry and fisheries in a sustainable manner.

“As stated in the Paris Agreement, taking action is required to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in order to achieve the long-term temperature goal of holding the increase to well below 2 degrees Celsius. This poses a serious challenge for the forestry sector to go beyond reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation through REDD+ and to further enhance carbon stocks. It is in this context that we launched this project in collaboration with FAO, the UN specialized agency with comparative advantage in monitoring, assessment and reporting on forests, land use and climate change, while Japan has been carrying out a number of bilateral/multinational programmes to support developing countries with the aim to prevent deforestation and forest degradation and increase afforestation and reforestation.  We believe that this project will achieve a great success and contribute to conserve and enhance sinks and reservoirs of greenhouse gasses,” affirmed Mr Shuji Oki, Director General of the Forestry Agency, MAFF, Japan.