On February 12, 2025, the Capacity-Building Initiative for Transparency-Global Support Programme (CBIT-GSP) held its sixth Closing Conversations webinar as a part of its knowledge sharing and stakeholder engagement activities.  
 
This episode covered the Global Forest project implemented by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and funded by the Global Environment Facility (GEF). The webinar hosted members of FAO’s implementing team to present the key components of the project and demonstrate key FAO platforms. 

The Closing Conversations series is a part of CBIT-GSP's provide stakeholders with opportunities to present the results of CBIT-GSP projects and share lessons learned, good practices and tools with other countries and the wider transparency community. This sixth episode was the first to cover a global project, which has been in implementation since 2020.  

Now in its second phase (2024-2026), the project unifies global forestry efforts and ensures open access to forest data from 236 countries and territories. The project seeks to bolster the capacity of countries to effectively and accurately report forest data, while also linking global, regional, and national actors to online transparency and knowledge platforms – particularly FAO’s Global Forest Resources Assessment (FRA) platform and Food and Agriculture Microdata Catalogue (FAM). 
 
The project responds to the increased need for accurate and standardised forest data to save the world's forest systems, as well as recent advances in international reporting requirements under the Enhanced Transparency Framework of the Paris Agreement which underscore the need to consider, produce, and disseminate accurate and consistent forest information. 
 

Rocio Condor, Forestry Officer and Project Manager of the Global CBIT-Forest project with FAO led the presentation of the project, outlining how the integrated approaches of the project builds shared ethics of transparency in reporting across FRA contributors and enables informed policy making within countries climate change mitigation and reporting efforts such as the Biennial Transparency Reports and Nationally Determined Contributions.  
 
The FRA platform is the world’s most comprehensive source of forest resources information which manages data on forests extent, condition, management, and uses globally. Data on the FRA is updated every five years and examines the status and trends in more than 50 forest related variables in 236 countries and territories between the period 1990 and 2025. 

“The platform and this project brought together two important groups -- those who collect data, collect, analyse and disseminate data and those who need that data to for climate reporting ... sometimes all these focal points are not connected and maybe not aware of each other. In some countries there is there is more than an institution that is collecting data,” said Ms. Condor.  

“We usually prepare two key documents to help countries adopt a standardized approach when submitting data and reporting to FRA. In addition, we have regional training sessions which work closely with each country, ensuring a consistent approach. And this includes of course guiding countries to use the best available data they have, maintaining consistencies in data sources over the year whenever possible, and aligning methodologies across all participating countries” explained Chiara Patriarca, Forest Resources Data Analyst from the FRA team at FAO.  

The FAO Food and Microdata Catalogue (FAM) was presented by Severine Huille, Statistician at FAO, who demonstrated the functionality of the platform. FAM provides updates on new study releases, surveys and microdata related to numerous collections, along with advanced filters to refine search terms. 

As examples of the CBIT-Forest project’s national level work Ms. Condor highlighted examples from Mexico, Bangladesh, Peru and Lao to discuss how country-level work is also supported by the FAO’s platforms. These include Foris -- which provides free open-source solutions for forest monitoring and forest and land monitoring -- and the National Forest Monitoring Assessment tool, launched during the first phase of CBIT-Forest --which support countries with performing capacity assessments of forest monitoring across three critical dimensions, institutional arrangements, measurement and estimation, and reporting and verification.  

So far CBIT-Forest has worked at the national level with more than 20 countries including Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Peru and Brazil, Ethiopia, Uganda, Congo, Sierra Leone, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia, Mongolia, Bangladesh, Nepal, Laos, Thailand, Indonesia, and Vanuatu. 

Regarding the global level work of the project, Ms Condor demonstrated the success of the Forest Monitoring for Climate Action series, which began in 2020. The series includes six self-paced open-access e-learning opportunities to strengthen the capacities of forest monitoring teams. The courses are linked to a verification test provided by FAO to formally recognise the competencies of sector specialists. Between June 2020 and December 2024 over 30,000 learners benefitted from the online courses. The courses have been enriched with extra resources and activities such as live session discussion, forums, videos, quizzes.  

CBIT-GSP is funded by the GEF and operates the Climate Transparency Platform. The platform provides a global overview of transparency initiatives and developing countries transparency efforts, allowing users to stay up to date on the latest developments, events, and knowledge products, as well as get detailed information on any developing country, support provider and transparency projects.