On forest monitoring and reporting in developing countries: lessons learnt and way forward

Under the COP Paris Agreement, countries need to prepare their GHG inventories with emissions by source and removals by sinks. In order to meet the UNFCCC quality standards, those inventories should be transparent, accurate, comparable, consistent and complete. For the LULUCF sector, emissions are a result from a change in one of the five IPCC carbon pools (e.g. aboveground biomass, etc.). The change in the carbon stock is not easily directly measured, but usually estimated using proxies of land area and area change and the average carbon stocks in the area. Countries encounter several challenges when collecting forestry and land use data information on land related to the inherent complexity of the measurement and monitoring of LULUCF sector and limited by their institutional arrangements. The REDD+ program of the United Nations has a long history of supporting developing countries on setting up the forest (and land use) monitoring system which has supported several countries to produce regular data and make it publicly available, even using web-geoportals. In this paper, we list the challenges of forestry and land data collection and demonstrate the potential leading role of REDD+ countries in the context of reporting regular GHG estimates for the LULUCF sector and the preparation of GHG baselines for the NDC progress reporting under the Paris Agreement, also in light with the recent developments in the COP25.

Key terms: Institutional arrangements, institutional memory, data management systems, legal instruments, sustainability, national forest monitoring system, LULUCF reporting, regular monitoring of land use data, preparation of land use change data. Data portals for increased transparency and stakeholder involvement. Targeted finance for data measurements at different agencies involved in the GHG inventory