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.

Countries around the world, including Kenya, are improving their national forest monitoring systems (NFMS) in response to the growing global demand for high integrity carbon credits. This demand is demonstrated by initiatives like the Lowering Emissions by Accelerating Forest finance (LEAF) Coalition, which commits to purchasing emission reductions. In order to sell carbon credits to LEAF, countries need to have reliable forest data that meets new carbon standards.

Over the years, Kenya has continued to experience high levels of food and nutrition insecurity. At the same time, the country is experiencing a rapid rate of urbanization, which is double the population growth rate. The growth of cities and urban areas has a direct impact on food security due to diminishing land for agriculture productivity and decreasing labour force, as a result of rural urban migration. In addition to reducing land for agriculture production, rapid urbanization contributes to climate change because of increasing greenhouse gas emissions from cities.

Every year around the world, 10 million hectares of forest are lost to deforestation and 70 million hectares are burnt by fire. In response, world leaders have committed to halt deforestation and restore 1 billion hectares of degraded land by 2030. To achieve this, countries need the right forest data to measure progress and enable action on the ground. To bridge this gap, FAO launched Open Foris over a decade ago.

We focus on alternative innovation pathways for addressing agricultural sustainability challenges in Odisha, India. The first pathway that we term as industrial, is focused on breeding new seed varieties in modern laboratories and test fields, ostensibly for climate resilience. It is driven by public scientific institutions and private corporations. The second pathway that we call agroecological, is grounded in saving and sharing of diverse local varieties, largely by Indigenous (Adivasi) smallholders and their allies in civil society.