A prime source of information about the state of the forests globally is the National-scale Forest Inventories (NFIs) at country level. In this context, FAO since its foundation in 1945, is helping countries in establishing and improving national capacities in collecting data on forests and monitoring the changes over time. Currently, FAO works in around 45 countries, including Myanmar, supporting the development and upgrading of their National Forest Monitoring Systems (NFMS). The objective of this endeavor is to enable countries to produce robust forest information in order to provide updated and reliable data for sound forest policy planning and evaluation as well as sustainable land and forest use.

The NFMS includes satellite based land monitoring systems (SLMS) and NFIs. Both are also crucial to develop the data needed for Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) in the context of Climate Change policies and strategies, including Greenhouse Gas Inventories, REDD+, Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) and other reporting needs.

Through the UN-REDD Programme in collaboration with Ministry of Natural Resource and Environmental Conservation (MoNREC), FAO is supporting the upgrading and improvement of national forest monitoring capacities and the development of a new NFI system. FAO’s main role is to provide technical advice, training and support in applying cutting edge methodologies and tools for forest inventory and monitoring in compliance with international standards.

As an important step for planning and designing of NFI as part of a wider National Forest Monitoring System in Myanmar, a two-day “NFI Methodology Workshop” was organized in Yangon on 10-11 December, presented by nearly 100 experts from government offices at Union, State and Region levels, Yangon and Mandalay Universities, INGO/NGOs, private sector and other organizations.

Throughout the presentations and knowledge and experience sharing sessions, the participants discussed the design and NFI sampling approaches and the proposed data collection methodologies, reviewed the NFI objectives and purposes, as well as discussed many practical and operational issues of measuring forests in Myanmar. The workshop recommendations and conclusions will be used for further NFI planning including the upcoming field training and testing of proposed methodologies.

This article originally appeared on FAO in Myanmar website: http://www.fao.org/myanmar/news/detail-events/en/c/1176073/ 

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