Regional workshop for capacity building and exchange of experiences in building methodologies for forest degradation estimation

Venue: Florencia (Caquetá), Colombia

Background

For more than a decade, countries that are party to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) have been working to build positive policies and incentives to reduce emissions associated with deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+). The REDD+ performance-based mitigation approach seeks to incentivise the reduction of emissions caused by deforestation and forest degradation, as well as to promote carbon sequestration and sound forest management.

The degradation of forests implies a reduction of their capacity as a carbon sink, as well as affecting their goods and other important ecosystem services such as water, soil and biodiversity conservation.  Reducing emissions from forest degradation is an important umbrella for maintaining healthy forest ecosystems and their productive capacities.  For this reason, several international offset mechanisms require both emissions reductions from deforestation and forest degradation.

In recent years, numerous studies have been carried out to assess deforestation and forest degradation, especially in tropical forests, following the guidelines of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  Deforestation monitoring has successfully overcome many of the technical and technological challenges, but forest degradation monitoring is still difficult to define, quantify and report.  This situation limits the options for countries to obtain greater offsets for forest-related emission reductions, because several international standards consider it mandatory, such as the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility's Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF-FC), the Transaction Architecture for REDD+ (ART) International Environmental Excellence Standard (TREES) or the VERRA Carbon Verification Standard.

Under this brief context, and in the framework of the UN-REDD Programme with the technical support of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology and Environmental Studies (IDEAM) and the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development of Colombia will develop from 14 to 17 November 2023, the "Regional workshop for capacity building and exchange of experiences on estimation of forest degradation", which will bring together experts from Latin America involved in forest degradation generation and will seek to open spaces for South-South collaboration.

General objective

To present and discuss the tools and methodologies for reporting forest degradation emissions implemented in the participating countries.

Specific objectives

- Strengthen the capacities of Latin American countries in the definition of concepts and methodologies for the estimation of forest degradation.

- Identify the most important challenges for monitoring forest degradation and propose solutions.

- Promote South-South exchanges between experts in the region on forest degradation monitoring.

Participants

Delegates from the countries of Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Honduras, Costa Rica and Argentina.