12 November 2019
FAO-GEF Project to Enhance Country Monitoring and Reporting on Forests
Photo by Luis Del Río Camacho
story highlights

The two-year project will build the capacity of developing countries to generate and contribute to more reliable, available, accessible and transparent forest data.

The project is one of four global projects approved under the GEF’s Capacity Building Initiative for Transparency.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) and the Global Environment Facility (GEF) have launched a project that aims to help countries improve their ability to monitor and track forest and land use change. These efforts are expected to contribute to tracking progress towards the SDGs and help developing countries meet enhanced transparency requirements under the Paris Agreement on climate change.

The two-year project will build the capacity of developing countries to generate contribute to more reliable, available, accessible and transparent forest data. Through the project, FAO will upgrade the Global Forest Resources Assessment (FRA 2020) reporting platform, which stores data on the status and trends of the world’s forest resources. The FRA upgrade will enable easier access to reported data.

The project will build country capacity in several ways. First, FAO is developing an e-learning course on transparency in the forest sector, which will be available to government forestry staff as well as other interested stakeholders, such as intergovernmental organizations, the private sector and academia. The project will organize sub-regional and national workshops in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean to build forest management capacity and introduce innovative forestry tools. Third, the project will identify and share case studies and best practices on transparency in the forest sector and develop communication and outreach materials to raise awareness on the importance of data collection, analysis and dissemination in increasing the forest sector’s transparency.

The project is one of four global projects approved under the GEF’s ‘Capacity Building Initiative for Transparency’ (CBIT), a trust fund that aims to support countries in implementing the Paris Agreement and to strengthen countries’ institutional and technical capacities to meet the Paris Agreements’ enhanced transparency framework. FAO is contributing US$5.2 million to the project, and the GEF is providing US$1.9 million. [FAO Press Release] [CBIT Website

related posts