Technological innovation driving transparent forest monitoring and reporting for climate action

This paper reviews how countries are benefiting from technical innovations in their monitoring and reporting of forest-related emissions and removals to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).Forests play an important role in climate action. They are often mentioned in nationally determined contributions (NDCs) with targets conditional on international climate finance. Despite countries reporting forest-related emission reductions (ERs) of 14.0 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e) to the UNFCCC, results-based finance for ERs has been limited. Nonetheless, more robust estimation methods have increasingly enabled accessing new sources of climate finance, including from the private sector. As such, technological solutions and capacity development for ER reporting can act as an engine that enables better resource management and improved access to climate finance.There has been enormous technological progress over the last decade, allowing increasingly robust forest dynamic assessments. Recent UNFCCC reference level submissions reveal an increased use of satellite imagery with higher spatial and temporal resolution: initial submissions relied entirely on Landsat imagery; after 2022, 100 percent used Sentinel and 50 percent used Planet imagery. Open source solutions are widely used by countries: 89 percent of countries reporting a reference level to the UNFCCC have used Open Foris, a set of free and open source solutions and platforms developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) for accessing and analysing data. Improvements in forest monitoring are crucial to better understand forests’ contribution to climate change mitigation and unlock climate finance.