At a Glance: Two years of CBIT-Forest capacity building, knowledge sharing and awareness-raising activities

20/01/2022

Action is needed to successfully meet the climate targets outlined in international treaties, such as the Paris Agreement, which set the goal of limiting global warming to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius. To achieve this goal, the Paris agreement called on countries to make individual commitments (nationally determined contributions or NDCs) to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. While such pledges offer promising results, global plans must turn into global action. However, in many cases, limitations and barriers continue to hinder such climate mitigation efforts.

The project, “Building global capacity to increase transparency in the forest sector (CBIT-Forest),” was developed to increase the institutional and technical capacities of developing countries to meet the requirements outlined in the Enhanced Transparency Framework (ETF) of the Paris Agreement. The ETF is particularly vital, as it helps to establish confidence and trust that all countries are working to meet their NDCs.

Funded by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and led by the Food and Agriculture organized of the United Nations (FAO), CBIT-Forest has supported global, regional and national activities related to forest data collection, analysis and dissemination. Through these actions, the project has sought to boost institutional and technical capacities directly in 49 target countries and more broadly in another 187 that are part of the global network of National Correspondents for the Global Forest Resources Assessment (FRA). The project’s seven pilot countries include Brazil, Côte d’Ivoire, Guatemala, Honduras, Lao PDR, Thailand and Uganda.

Launched in 2019, the CBIT-Forest project comes to a close this year. But it leaves an impressive record of activities, events and knowledge products. This month, the project’s outputs were compiled and published in the CBIT-Forest “2-years in numbers” publication, 2022 edition. This publication shares an overview of the project, including global and regional webinars, online learning materials, videos, social media messages, blog posts, case studies and more. It also breaks down the project impact, sharing information on participation and target audiences.

CBIT-Forest produced materials available in multiple languages, including the self-paced elearning course, “Forests and transparency under the Paris Agreement,” which is available for free in English, Spanish, French, Chinese, Russian and Arabic. The project’s knowledge materials, including posters, technical reports and information notes, were all made available in English, Spanish and French. In addition to increasing capacities and promoting knowledge sharing, CBIT-Forest also drew attention to vulnerable communities and highlighted the important roles of women and indigenous people in forest management and monitoring. The overall share of female participants in CBIT-Forest project activities is of 38 percent.

Other noteworthy results of the project include:

Three editions of the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on forests and transparency under the Paris Agreement were delivered in English, Spanish and French, with a total of 1 883 participants from 148 countries – now available and open to everybody.
All six case studies, produced for Bangladesh, Chile, Costa Rica, Ghana, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Papua New Guinea have been viewed a total of 6 155 times.
The FRA reporting and dissemination platform, designed to improve access to forest-related data and support transparency related activities, has received 50 907 views.
The project launched 9 elearning modules on national forest inventories.
The national forest monitoring system (NFMS) assessment tool “Quick Guidance” instruction manual has been downloaded 1 550 times.
Overall, the project webpage was viewed 22 489 times.

Explore the CBIT-Forest “2-years in numbers, 2022” publication in its entirety here.

Related Resources:

Boosting transparency of forest data

At a Glance: Two years of CBIT-Forest capacity building, knowledge sharing and awareness-raising activities