The battle against deforestation requires new technological advancements while innovation and technology have revolutionized forest monitoring. These innovations are essential for early warning systems, sustainable commodity production, and empowering Indigenous Peoples through land mapping and climate finance access as the International Day of Forests 2024 highlighted.
In 2012, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed March 21st as the International Day of Forests (IDF) to celebrate and raise awareness of the importance of all types of forests.
Countries are encouraged to undertake local, national, and international efforts to organize activities involving forests and trees, such as tree planting campaigns.
The International Day of Forests 2024 theme focused on “Forests and Innovation: New Solutions for a Better World” with the FAO marking IDF 2024 by showcasing transformative innovations such as advances in forest monitoring, early warning systems, and other vital technical solutions that are being used to help countries halt deforestation and forest degradation at an event.
We are in the midst of a forest data revolution driven by innovation and technology, enabling countries to track and report on their forests more easily and effectively. With 10 million hectares of forest lost annually due to deforestation and approximately 70 million hectares affected by fires, new solutions are essential, said FAO Deputy Director-General Maria Helena Semedo.
AIM4Forests
Technological innovation has vastly improved the ability to monitor the world’s forests and offer a robust way to guide actions to protect, restore, and sustainably use forests. In particular, it can empower Indigenous Peoples who take care of many remote forested areas.
Technological innovation and associated scaling up of practices in 20 countries, including innovative work with Indigenous Peoples in Papua New Guinea (PNG), has been enabled thanks to US$30 million in support from the United Kingdom for the Accelerating innovative monitoring for forests (AIM4Forests) initiative in 2023 and implemented in collaboration with UN-REDD and GFOI.
The project aims to provide countries with the technological means to combat deforestation and ensure the active participation of Indigenous Peoples in forest monitoring. It has already been rolled out with a sense of urgency in 11 countries.
The UK is leading the way in supporting developing countries to adapt to climate change and protect precious forests that are vital to keep 1.5 alive. With our partners at FAO, we are proud to support the AIM4Forests program, sharing UK expertise to deliver innovative technologies that will monitor and tackle deforestation, said Graham Stuart, the United Kingdom’s Minister for Energy Security and Net Zero.
Expanding the frontier with partners
The International Day of Forests event saw the launch of Ground, a pathbreaking new mobile application within FAO’s highly successful Open Foris initiative, developed in collaboration with Google and benefiting from the increasing availability of satellite imagery.
Open Foris already includes SEPAL and Earth Map, which allow users to access and process historical and new satellite data that, thanks to the intuitive ease and big-data capabilities of Google Earth Engine, enable highly granular visualization and statistical analysis of vegetation, climate, water, forests and other datasets that can generate tailored products for local needs both quickly and for free.
Some 90 percent of countries reporting 13.7 billion tonnes of forest emission reductions or enhancements used Open Foris. Open Foris has been used by over 200,000 individuals from 196 countries.
Breaking new ground with Ground
Ground is the fruit of a collaboration between Google, FAO, and other partners. It is specifically designed for non-technical users who work where internet bandwidth is scarce or absent, allowing indigenous people and farmers to collect information on their area of forest or agricultural plots.
Ground was successfully piloted by FAO in a recent field application in Papua New Guinea and Ivory Coast.
It promises to be an important participatory and technical solution to accelerate restoration efforts, enable small-holder participation in regulated markets, and bolster initiatives to demarcate customary lands.
Open Foris Ground was envisioned as a map-based tool that could be used in a variety of contexts with little or no special training. Indigenous people can collect data about their lands with minimal outside help, on top of high-resolution satellite imagery from Google Earth. Open Foris Ground enables smallholder farmers and local communities to report data that is important to their livelihoods, from the ground to the cloud. This is the most recent development in our near-decade-long partnership with FAO, where among other efforts, we helped countries realize forest-based climate action, said Google Earth Director Rebecca Moore.
Renewed MoU
Ground will help further technological innovation across FAO’s mandate and a new multi-year Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was also signed between FAO and Google.
The new MoU will deepen the engagement from the MoU signed in 2015, which has catalyzed numerous geospatial solutions enabling FAO Members to dramatically upscale environmental literacy and implement science-based policies in practically real-time, not to mention combat locusts.
It is increasingly evident how large a role forests will play in climate actions making transparent and reliable assessments of forest carbon fluxes even more imperative – both to improve knowledge and to unlock results-based finance.
The important technological contributions made in the past decade, buoyed by the provision of digital public goods, as demonstrated by FAO, Google Earth Engine, and many other Open Foris partners, offer grounds for optimism.
FAO’s recent publication, “Technological innovation during transparent forest monitoring and reporting for climate action”, reviews how countries are benefiting from new technologies and their dissemination, with usable satellite imagery driving transformational approaches.
The more robust estimation methods now available point to strong prospects for new types of climate finance, including through linkage to carbon markets, and an expansion of the range of actors able to drive and benefit from the emphasis on sustainability.
