On 26 February, delegates from the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Conservation of Myanmar (MONREC), the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland and Natural Resources Institute Finland (LUKE) gathered in Rome for a 5-day long national forest inventory (NFI) session hosted by FAO REDD+/NFM team. The session provided a platform to share knowledge and experiences in developing a robust national forest inventories focusing on the specific characteristics of Myanmar’s forests. Myanmar has the second-largest forest cover of land area in Southeast Asia. Recognising the forests’ ability to contribute to climate change mitigation and poverty reduction, the Government of Myanmar is...

Deforestation is driven by human activity, but by using innovative technologies to predict and monitor changes in land use, countries will be far better equipped to halt its spread. At a recent international conference “Working across Sectors to Halt Deforestation and Increase Forest Area – from Aspiration to Action,” participants shared innovations and experience in satellite-based land-use monitoring as well as ground-based measurements. Countries that invest in and apply such tools more widely have achieved greater success in their programmes to increase reforestation, afforestation and forest restoration. One particular tool SEPAL (System for Earth Observation Data Access, Processing and Analysis for...

International climate negotiations have identified the need to establish national forest monitoring systems that use a combination of remote sensing and ground-based forest inventory approaches. This is to estimate anthropogenic forest-related greenhouse gas emissions by sources, and removals by sinks, to support REDD+ implementation and assess performance when implementing REDD+ activities. Countries and jurisdictions are advancing in the development of their Reference Levels to measure the performance of their REDD+ related activities. Countries have to generate forest cover change information in order to estimate activity data. The activity data combined with Emission Factors allows to estimate (historical) emissions. FAO and through...

In recent years, climate change actions have played a unifying role in connecting nations in the common pursuit of utilising forests for the benefit of humankind. This role was emphasized during the International Conference “Halting Deforestation and Increasing Forest Area – from Aspiration to Action” that took place at FAO Headquarters in Rome on 20-22 February 2018. Organized by the Collaborative Partnership on Forests, the conference brought together decision-makers from governments, UN agencies, private sector stakeholders as well as representatives from indigenous peoples, local communities, NGOs and academia to discuss the challenges of halting and reversing deforestation and to jointly explore ways...

Science and gender equality are both crucial to a country’s development and essential to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. FAO offices across the world are taking active measures to encourage female applicants and to recruit women, and REDD+ is no exception. There are many women working in various scientific areas related to REDD+, continuously contributing to reducing emission from deforestation and forest degradation in countries around the world and eventually mitigating climate change. On the occasion of the International Day of Women and Girls in Science on 11 February, we talked to Naila Yasmin, a remote sensing and GIS analyst from Pakistan,...