Forest monitoring for climate action

31/12/2023

The 'Forest monitoring for climate action' curriculum aims to strengthen institutional and technical capacities, to meet the measurement, reporting and verification requirements, as well as the enhanced transparency framework requisites.

It consists of a series of e-learning courses, including:

Forests and transparency under the Paris Agreement

The objective of this course is to learn about the Enhanced Transparency Framework (ETF) under the Paris Agreement. It will be useful to those wishing to understand the importance of forest-related data collection, analysis and dissemination in meeting the Enhanced Transparency Framework requirements.

 

Institutionalization of forest data

This course intends to establish a clear path towards a more efficient and effective use of forest data, underscoring the crucial significance of institutionalizing a robust national forest monitoring system (NFMS) within countries. Additionally, it emphasizes transparency, sustainability, and data-sharing as critical pillars for the successful implementation of an NFM strategy.

 

Measurement, reporting and verification for environmental integrity: Introduction

This course highlights the importance of forests in climate change mitigation and how quality measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) is needed to ensure environmental integrity. It outlines the MRV requirements for jurisdictional REDD+ of different standards/programmes, in case countries are seeking to obtain results-based payments or climate finance.

 

Measurement, reporting and verification for environmental integrity: Application

Forests area change estimates are crucial for estimating forest-related emissions and removals in the REDD+ context. This two-lesson course emphasize that the use of rigorous activity data, produced according to good practices, is key to meeting monitoring, verification and reporting (MRV) requirements of REDD+ programmes and standards. 

Following good practices in area estimation based on the stratification derived from a forest change map, the first lesson introduces the sample-based area estimation (SBAE) workflow. The second lesson advances the learner using a stepwise approach to conducting a SBAE. In doing so accuracy is assessed following good practices and confidence intervals (a common technical requirement in REDD+ Programmes and Standards) are calculated.

 

Additional courses

Sharing the "Forests and Transparency under the Paris Agreement" MOOC multilingual experience

Sharing the experience on “Forest and land monitoring for climate action – SEPAL” facilitated course

 

Working towards SDGs: