Earth Map, a pioneering initiative by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) that leverages freely available archives of geospatial data for climate and environment monitoring and mapping has been honoured with a Google Geo for Good Impact Award.

The European Union's Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) represents a step to reduce deforestation by mandating that companies and producers demonstrate that their products have not contributed to deforestation. However, the effectiveness of such regulatory frameworks relies on the accuracy and reliability of the data used to demonstrate compliance. Herein lies the importance of Open Foris Ground, a collaborative solution developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and Google, aimed at enhancing data collection and validation processes.

The “Support to Sustainable Forestry in Sierra Leone” initiative, launched in 2023 and Funded by the European Union Delegation in Freetown with technical help from the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, intends to contribute to sustainable forest management in Sierra Leone. ...

On March 21st, the International Day of Forests celebrated the pivotal role of innovation in transforming forest monitoring. A key aspect of FAO and partner countries’ innovative work is the utilization of Planet's high-resolution satellite imagery through the NICFI Satellite Da...

Mobile application can help accelerate restoration efforts, enable small-holder participation in regulated markets, and bolster initiatives to demarcate customary lands

Today is International Day of Forests, a day designated by the United Nations to celebrate our world’s forests and their contributions to the planet. Forests...

Ghana recently submitted forest-related emission reductions to ART-TREES, making it the third country to do so worldwide, and the first African country. The achievement stems from consistent efforts to improve the quality of its forest data and Measurement, reporting and Verification (MRV) to meet ART-TREES requirements, unlocking valuable climate finance.

Collect Earth Online (CEO) and SEPAL (System for Earth Observation Data Access, Processing and Analysis for Land Monitoring) are part of cutting-edge suite of platforms to interpret satellite data, generate land cover and land use change maps, calculate land change area, and estimate activity data.

From September 25th to 28th, a significant Open Foris event took place at the FAO Rome Headquarters. 

In May and June 2023, the CAFI/FAO Deforestation and Degradation Drivers project, in coordination with the Gabonese national project partner, AGEOS, and the Gabonese Agency for Spatial Observation, organized a series of online sessions to build capacity for generating high-integrity forest data using Open Foris platforms, including SEPAL and Collect Earth Online (CEO), reaching more than 300 participants, of whom 40% were women.

Ghana has received its first Emission Reduction payment from the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) Carbon Fund, a World Bank funding mechanism. In January 2023, the country received USD 4,862,280 for emission reductions of 972,456 tons of carbon emissions (tCO2eq), for the first monitoring period under the program (June to December 2019), achieved by reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, and enhancing carbon removals through afforestation and reforestation in Ghana’s Cocoa Forest landscape.

“We are in the golden age of open data and remote sensing”, said FAO Forestry Officer Erik Lindquist opening the panel discussion at the Connecting Forests and People event organized by FAO's National Forest Monitoring team on October 20 in the framework of the Science and Innovation Forum 2022. “Never before have we had so much information at our fingertips about the Earth's environment and surface to process and learn. The main challenge, though, is making better decisions based on the better data.”

• More than 35,000 people in 180 countries now use Open Foris – an open-source initiative to collect, analyze, and report critical forest and land data.
• By enabling countries to report accurately the emission reductions they achieve, the tools help them secure results-based climate finance to accelerate the protection and sustainable management of forests.

In this article we present Earth Map, a free and open-source software developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) to facilitate the visualization, processing and analysis of land and climate data. Earth Map has been developed in the framework of the FAO-Google partnership thanks to the support of the International Climate Initiative (IKI). Earth Map is also one of the free open-source solutions for environmental monitoring under the umbrella of the Open Foris Initiative. Using Earth Map we will explore the recent Sierra Bermeja wildfire and present our findings.