FCMC travels to Mexico for Forest Monitoring Workshop

FCMC travels to Mexico for Forest Monitoring Workshop
From January 14 to 18, FCMC joined SilvaCarbon in holding the seventh Latin American regional MRV workshop in Mérida, Mexico. The workshop included invitees from government and governmental partners, and SilvaCarbon and FCMC members, including Rishi Das, MRV Analyst at FCMC.

The workshop was facilitated by the Group on Earth Observation-Forest Carbon Tracking (GEO-FCT) Portal, with support from SilvaCarbon, U.S. Forest Service, Moore Foundation, FCMC and the GEO Secretariat. This event was the seventh in the series of technical workshops since August 2011, and is the third workshop that FCMC has supported as part of its coordination with SilvaCarbon.

The objective of the workshop was to review the status of MRV for REDD+ at the national level for the countries represented and to discuss strategies, tools and protocols for advancing national greenhouse gas inventories in the forestry sector to higher levels of reporting. Technical themes included reviews of: sample-stratification techniques for reducing uncertainty in inventories and producing activity maps for greenhouse-gas reporting specific to countries’ needs; advances in remote sensing; intensive carbon monitoring and associated challenges; and carbon models used to simulate forest carbon dynamics in Australia, Canada and the U.S. The workshop highlighted progress made in Mexico through a combination of several of the techniques discussed, as well as a field visit to an intensive carbon monitoring site in the Yucatan peninsula.

Participant countries identified current capacity-building needs and outlined action for progress to higher tier levels of reporting. During the discussions, participants evaluated the associated costs and challenges in terms of material and institutional capacity for progressing to higher tier reporting and for using advanced methods of carbon monitoring for national systems. The participating countries were Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Colombia, Peru and Ecuador. There were representatives from the US Forest Service, SilvaCarbon/USGS, Canadian Forest Service, FAO, Mexico’s Forest Service (Comision Nacional Forestal or CONAFOR), Mexico’s National Biodiversity Comission (Comisión Nacional para el Conocimiento y Uso de la Biodiversidad or CONABIO), Mexican universities/technical institutes, and US and Oxford Universities. Funding for the workshop was provided by SilvaCarbon, FCMC and CONAFOR.

For more information about SilvaCarbon and the GEO-FCT, click here.

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