A four-year FAO project to enhance Viet Nam’s national forest inventory and monitoring has wrapped up with a workshop to identify its achievements and the way forward.

The two-day workshop for the Support to National Assessment and Long Term Monitoring of the Forest and Tree Resources in Viet Nam (NFA) project was held in Tam Dao Town in Vinh Phuc Province with representatives from FAO headquarters and Viet Nam office, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) and key donor the Finnish Embassy.

The project is part of the global FAO Finland Sustainable Forest Management in a Changing Climate Programme and locally it assisted MARD from March 2011 to enhance the National Forest Inventory and Monitoring Program (NFI). Implemented by the Forest Inventory and Planning Institute (FIPI), it successfully met all its outputs such as sampling design for NFI, developing technical manuals for data collection and processing, capacity building for forest inventories and developing forest maps and inventory databases to benefit REDD+ monitoring.

“Information on forest resources is needed at various levels for decision-making and forest management purposes, starting from individual forest owners to decision-makers of global community. During the past decades and under the increasing threats of changing climate, people have begun to realize we are not alone. Decision and actions of each individual land owners or countries impact on global stability regarding the environment and climate change,” said FAO Viet Nam representative Jong-Ha Bae told the workshop on 25 -26 June, 2015.

FAO will continue to support Viet Nam’s NFI through to the calculation and analyses of final results to address national and international data needs.

“We believe that, the results and outputs of the NFA project will contribute to the Viet Nam’s strategies on socio-economic development and environment protection as well as efforts to mitigate climate change,” said JongHa Bae, FAO Representative in Viet Nam