 Well, good morning, good afternoon, and good evening everyone to all of those of you who have joined us today. A very special good morning to our colleagues who are joining us bright and early from Costa Rica at 8am. It's fantastic to see so many of you online for the second of our two-part webinar series. For those who were unable to join us last week, the Sibet Forest team convened a panel with our colleagues and partners from the Global Environment Facility and the UNFCCC. To explore and unpack the enhanced transparency framework. That dialogue focused on some of the more broad topics of interest, mainly exploring what is changing for parties and countries as we move from measurement reporting and verification to the new enhanced transparency framework and how the Sibet Forest project is supporting countries in that transition. And today we're really excited to continue elements of that dialogue, but really narrow in a bit more on the national level. And we're thrilled to be able to zoom in more with our colleagues from Costa Rica and to explore the national system for monitoring land cover, land use and ecosystems called Simokute. So in today's sessions, we will blend both presentations and have a moderated dialogue to hopefully shine the spotlight on the system which has been in development since 2015. We will explore some of its strengths and challenges that it's had in its development. And to do so we will hear first from Mr. Lucio Santos and Mr. Rafael Vargas. We will also hear today from the Sibet Forest project coordinator, Ms. Rocío Condor, who will give us a quick overview of the project activities and specifically touch on the NFMS tool, which is being piloted at country levels to help enhance and create a more robust national forest monitoring system. Following these presentations, we will host a moderated dialogue and take questions from all of you. Now before we jump in any further to the actual content, let me start by introducing myself. My name is Khalil Walgi. I work for the National Forest Monitoring Team here at FAO and I'll be your moderator and overall company for today's session. I am perhaps like some of you are not expert in these topics, but really hope that our discussion and through the presentations, we can uncover and focus on some of these various themes and expertise that are brought forth by our speakers. Now that you know who I am, I'd love to hear more about you. So I invite you to take a moment, pop your name and your affiliation into the chat box below and share with us where you're from. You'll also note that we are hosting this session in a webinar style, meaning that all of your microphones are muted. However, you still have the opportunity to interact with us and with our panelists to do so you can pose a question in the Q&A box below. And if someone has already posed a question of interest, feel free to give it a thumbs up. Today we have our colleague Emily Donaghan from FAO who will be helping us select the most appropriate questions for our panel. So I hope that gives you a brief overview of how we'll spend the next hour together and how we can interact through the Zoom platform. So without delaying any further, I'd like to introduce you to our first speaker, Mr. Lucio Santos from FAO, a Forestry Officer and Red Plus Coordinator in the Latin American and Caribbean region, who is located in the sub-regional office for Mesoamerica in Panama. Lucio will start us off with a presentation and some introductory remarks. Lucio, thanks very much for joining us and I turn the screen over to you. Thanks so much, Khalil and the speakers and participants. I'm excited to be here today to highlight the importance of forest data and transparency, especially for sharing the lessons layer of Costa Rítica regarding the institutionalization and strengthening of the National Forest Monitoring System, which is a key piece to provide information related to climate action in a transparent and an open way. Just to confirm, are you seeing my screen? Yeah, we can see your screen. Perfect. So let me give you some remarks on forest relevance, which plays a central role in combating climate change. As you may be aware, terrestrial ecosystem mainly forests contribute significantly to climate change mitigations since they remove about one tier of the current anthropogenic CO2 equivalent in the greenhouse emission. Also, forests are crucial in helping us adapt to climate change as they help ensure water availability, protect against landslides, prevent the certification and provide alternative livelihoods for people. Likewise, protecting forests conserves the biodiversity that is vital for plants, humans and other animals to adapt to climate change. Forest cover 31% of the global land area and the net loss of forest area has decreased substantially since 1990, but the forestation and forest degradation continue to take place at alarming rates, resulting in significant loss of biodiversity and emission of greenhouse gases. In this slide, you see a snapshot of the greenhouse gas emission profile that illustrates the share of economy-wide emission by sector in the left side for all the Latin American region and in the right side for assuming in Central America. As you can see, the agriculture and the forestry and other land use sector represents the largest share of emission in the region, 46%. While in Central America also the illusive sector and the agricultural sector are also a significant source of emissions. The message is we need to take action to limit our emission and to do so, we need to be better informed in order to take the best decision. To do that, for this, we need to the robust and sustainable monitoring system in order to produce the information to support also domestic policies and goals. That information system will also provide information of countries and DC for communication and accounting, as well as for the reporting of emission and removals from the forestry sector in the frame of the enhancement transparency framework of the Paris Agreement. Well, in this knowledge sharing session, you will have the opportunity of knowing Costa Rica's experience that allow it strengthening the functionalities and sustainability over the time of its national forest monitoring system. I would like finally to emphasize on the importance to adopt appropriate legal frameworks that regulate aspects of national forest monitoring system and clarify roles and responsibilities of national institutions to ensure sustainability. The figure here shows and statewide approach for this legal framework, starting by a gap analysis of the forest legal framework focusing on national forest monitoring system aspects and in their roles and responsibilities of national or national institutions, following up by following by interviews with key stakeholders from different institutions involved in national forest monitoring system activities in order to identify gaps for then identify legal provision that are needed to cover these gaps and finally recommend and drafting legal instruments to be channeled to the appropriate national entities. So let me start here and hand over to Khalil. I hope you will enjoy the webinar and keep available for the Q&A session. Thank you very much. Thanks so much, Lucio, for these brief opening remarks and we'll have an opportunity to dive a bit more into these topics in our discussion. But I really, I quite like your final slide, which I think highlights, but also visualizes the stepwise approach that's needed for creating appropriate legal frameworks in support of functional NFMS systems, but also calls to the need of strong country ownership. So I think it's a really great way to start our webinar today and I think we can dive in a bit more later on. But I'd like to now introduce our next presentation and I'd like to start with a bit of brief background on the CBIT Forest Project, which is funded through the Global Environment Facility Trust Fund. The FOW-JF partnership is one that has been ongoing for nearly 20 years and has been key to addressing critical issues at the intersection of agriculture and the environment. More broadly, the FOW-JF partnership has enabled over 130 countries to build a healthier planet and more resilient communities. Currently, FOW-JF projects make up over 20% of the current Jeff 7 portfolio. And in the next presentation, we will hear about one of those initiatives, the capacity building for increased transparency, cibit forests. Currently it has 12 CBIT projects, two global projects, the CBIT Forest Project and CBIT AFOLU, and the remaining 10 are national cibit programs. So now to give us a much more in-depth overview, I'd like to turn the floor to Rocío Condor, Forestry Officer and the Project Coordinator of the Cibit Forest Project. Rocío, thanks for joining us and I turn the microphone to you. Thank you very much, Halil, and I will start sharing the screen. Just let me know what do you see so I can start my presentation. Thanks Halil and thanks Lucio for these welcoming remarks and let me add by sharing with all participants three key messages. We need to urgently take action to tackle climate change and its impact. The Paris Agreement and its call for better and more transparent data is instrumental. The Paris Agreement was signed by 195 countries represented their commitment to limit the rise of global average temperate to well below two degrees Celsius and to pursue the efforts to limit the increase to 1.5 degrees. To reach this goal, we need to take bold and unprecedented action to limit our emissions and to do this, we need the stakeholders and governments who are informed by and acting with better and more transparent data. But how do we ensure that? A fully functioning multipurpose national forest monitoring system allows countries to track progress on climate action and effectively report on forest related emissions and removals, as well as response to their own forest data needs. Building an NFMS is a complex national scale effort that must consider multiple institutional technical and financial aspects. The system should increase transparency, reliability of information produced and ensure a long term perspective through participatory processes. Ultimately national forest monitoring systems can help countries to meet the requirements of the transparency framework under the Paris Agreement. National ownership and sustainability of the NFMS depends on institutional capacities to meet the forest information needs of users. These calls for continuous strengthening of human capacities in the technical field of forest monitoring, program management, administration and operation. The NFMS should ensure that persons responsible for implementation have the appropriate level of education and the necessary knowledge and experience. There is a need to develop and sustain national capacity to maintain NFMS, in particular technical capacity in remote sensing, field measurement, data processing, information management and communication techniques. But how is FAO contributing to efforts toward implementation of the Paris Agreement? Building global capacity to increase transparency in the forest sector, CVIT Forest, is a two year project of the FAO financed by the Capacity Building Initiative for Transparency Trust Fund of the Global Environment Facility, aiming to strengthen the institutional and technical capacities of developing countries to collect, analyze and disseminate forest related data. This project is built on already existing efforts of the FAO to support countries on forest monitoring at global and national levels. Therefore, this project is being implemented by FAO's Global Forest Resource Assessment at the National Forest Monitoring Teams. How are we doing that? By organizing sub-regional and national worships across the regions, 26 countries targeted as well as 187 countries and territories included as part of the global network of national correspondents for the FAO. We are maintaining the network of key partners such as the UNFCCC, JFOI, UNEP, UNDP by seeking cooperation to work on products or activities of the project. Upgrading FAO's FRA 2020 reporting on dissemination platform to make forest data reporting easier in the future. And actually I'm happy to share with you that this morning the FAO has released the full results of the FRA 2020 through three key resources, the FRA main report, the 2036 detailed report of all countries and territories of the world, as well as the platform I've just mentioned. Developing the learning course to enable access to knowledge about the ETF and the forest to anyone anywhere in multiple languages. The English version was just launched on the 15th of July. If you miss it, please access our web story to get the video. By also building and maintaining continuous awareness of the project. We have also prepared multiple language cases studies on forest and transparency being Costa Rica, one of them. And last but not least developing a spreadsheet based tool to facilitate the assessment of gaps and needs in countries national forest monitoring. This is like I, I would like to introduce some key information related to the NFMS assessment tool. How can country benefit the NFMS assessment tool aims to assist countries in strengthening their NFMS by facilitating understanding of FAO's voluntary guidance on national forest monitoring. Identifying needs gaps and weakness, enhancing opportunities to focus countries efforts and investment, helping to organize international cooperation and build a work plan together with stakeholders and partners. Assessing progress in identifying capacity gaps in forest monitoring. The tool is already available in English, French and Spanish and is accessible through the e-learning course on forest and transparency under the Paris Agreement. Here is the link to the course, which is accessible online or downloadable. Have a look with me today learning. The first model will explain how we are moving from the measurement reporting and verification framework tower, the ETF under the Paris Agreement. The second model reviews the goal and scope of the NFMS and present key guidance elements to strengthen national forest monitoring capacities. And then you will find the new tool. And the last model discusses how the NFMS enabled countries to produce reliable and transparent data and thus contribute with the ETF. Thank you very much for your attention and let me end by saying that all countries have innovative solutions to offer. Developing countries in particular emerging economies are increasingly cooperating and exchanging knowledge and development solution with other developing countries. FAO is fully committed to facilitating this connection. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Rocio. Just a few interventions from my side before we move to the next presentation. I see in the Q&A box we already have two questions. There's no certificate available for participation in this webinar. However, if you are keen to earn a certificate, I do think the new e-courses, e-learning courses, which Rocio has just mentioned and are now available. They were launched last week is the perfect way to really solidify some of the content that we're discussing today. So I believe Emily has already shared that link in the chat. Please follow it there. They're available online and offline to be downloaded. So take a look if you are seeking a certificate. But yeah, thank you very much, Rocio, for the presentation. I think you were spot on there with your final remarks when you said different countries have innovative solutions to offer. And thus the importance really of knowledge sharing and co-creating solutions together. And I think this is also why we're very excited to hear from our next speaker to get the main presentation of our webinar today. I think Costa Rica is well known as a world leader in environmental sustainability for many reasons, but Simokute, the Simokute system maybe needed to be added to that list. It really shows the main purpose of finding solutions by collecting data through cross-sectoral means. And I think it's trying to find solutions across a landscape which is integral to the global challenges that we're currently facing. So I won't take up too much more time, but I'd like to invite our next speaker, Mr. Rafael Mange from the director. He's the director of the National Center for Geo-Environmental Information at the Ministry of Environment and Energy of Costa Rica. Rafael is an economist with broad experience in different fields related to environmental information, including the development of the national land use, land cover and ecosystem monitoring system. Simokute. Rafael, we thank you for making the time to join us and look forward to your presentation. The screen is yours. Hola, Jalil. Thank you very much. I'm going to start sharing my screen. Just let me know when you're able to see it. Perfect. Okay, great. And first of all, thank you for the invitation to participate in this webinar for its data and transparency, assuming on Costa Rica's experience. Hello to everybody around the world that has joined us in this live streaming of the webinar and also to those who are watching will be watching this recording. I saw some of the names there are people that I know and actually you're going to see them in some of the pictures that I'm going to show in this presentation. Thank you very much to FAO for organizing this event and congratulations for the launch of the learning course on forest and transparency on their Paris agreement. Also, thank you for considering Costa Rica as a case study for this course and for highlighting our progress in the development of for national land use, land cover and ecosystem monitoring system. We call Simokute. This gives us a lot of motivation and inspiration to continue with our work and also to share our knowledge with other countries that may face the same challenges we have had in order to build a robust national forest monitoring system and generate generate more clear, transparent, accessible and accurate forest data of a country. I want to switch my screen to have to start some mouth because today I want to zoom in to Costa Rica first and I want to switch my screen to the geographic viewer that we are developing for the technological platform of Simokute. This is the first time we're showing this live and this geographic viewer hasn't even been launched yet and you are getting a quick preview of how is it going to look like. Costa Rica is a country in Central America located in the tropical zone of the Northern Hemisphere or an official slogan is Pura Vida. We have coasts in the Pacific and in the Atlantic. And we're neighbors with Panama in the south, also with Nicaragua in the north, but also we are neighbors with Ecuador and Colombia in our marine territory or countries 11 times bigger in the sea than in the land. And we are responsible of 51,000 square kilometers of land as forest only grows inland. That's the territory where I'm going to focus today's presentation. As you mentioned, Halil, we have built a renowned green train mark center on conservation, reforestation, national parks and high ambition schools. This has been an important driver of our economy, of our economic growth and well being of the nation. We're also renowned for our biodiversity. And here you can find holding between four and 6% of the world species. 26% of our territory is covered by protected areas. And to promote connectivity with these areas. We have also defined 44 biological corridors that represent 32% of our land's territory. And according to the latest data reported by Costa Rica to the global forest resource assessment, the found 59.44% of our country is covered by forest by the year 2020. Going to go back to the presentation. Well, back to the slides. Here you can see the map with the same information that was showing you before with the protected areas and biological corridors of the country. And here you can also see a map of the types of forest in Costa Rica for 2014. It was generating during the development process of our national forest inventory. In this territory 31% is classified as mature forest, which is forest with more than 75 years of age. These are the dark greens that we have here in the map. And also 39% of all the forest cover is located in state protected areas. And 61% is located in private territories. With this information of the forest inventory, we have also created forest environmental accounts using the United Nations framework system of environmental and economic accounting, which provides a methodology to measure national capital and physical and monetary values. We have analyzed that for 2013, the extended forest economy represented 2% of our country's GDP compared to the 0.2% that is estimated for the forestry sector during the same year using the traditional national accounts methodology. So this analysis doesn't include the value of the ecosystem services that comes from the forest and we hope to generate new information on that soon with our colleagues from the Central Bank. Also Costa Rica, since 2010 Costa Rica has demonstrated a sustained effort in the implementation of red actions at the national level. The country has historically operated its national system of protected areas and its program of payments for ecosystem environmental services, which together covered 35% of the country and 70% of the forest. This has been reflected in the growth trend of the emission reductions observed during the 2010-2015 period. During this time, more than 26 million tons of CO2 emissions reductions have been reached, resulting in doubling emission reductions observed in 2010. Costa Rica shows a clear tendency to recover forest resources. The country helped the net loss of forest and has begun a gain of native forest. Between 1986 and 2015, the deforested area fell gradually, as shown in this left, and the area of secondary forest has grown steadily, evidencing a trend of increase in forest cover. The trend of increasing emission reductions demonstrates the country's performance in implementing red policies and measures, significantly influencing the following factors. The conservation of primary forests, reduction of deforestation in primary and secondary forests, which has significantly reduced carbon emissions and the recovery of native forests, improving carbon stocks and significantly increasing carbon removals due to forest growth. An important legal framework and different institutions that support how we manage our forests in Costa Rica. The Forest Law of 1996, represented in this slide, in combination with the Organic Environmental Law of 1995 and the Biodiversity Law of 1998, represent the legal body that creates and defines the roles and responsibilities of the institutions in the forest sector, like the National System of Conservation Areas, SINAC, and the National Forestry Financing Fund, FONAFIFO. It is important to highlight that this Forest Law, because it mandates that in forest territories, land use change is not permitted in Costa Rica, only for specific reasons. We have also defined a set of policy instruments that define our ambitious sustainable development targets, like the National Development Plan, the National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan, the National Decarbonization Plan, and the National Forestry Development Plan. These instruments are created, guided and supported by the international processes where our country actively participates, like the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the three real conventions on biodiversity, climate change and desertification. The National Decarbonization Plan establishes the ambitious goal of becoming a zero net emissions economy by 2050, in line with the objectives of the Paris Climate Change Agreement. With the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the plan includes significant measures in public and private transport, energy, industry, agriculture, waste management, and rural, urban and forest management. To monitor the emission reduction commitments related to the National Red Strategy, Costa Rica has developed the National Land Use, Land Cover and Ecosystem Monitoring System, SIMOCUTE, which has grown to become a comprehensive, multi-purpose and multi-disciplinary monitoring system that supports various decision making processes. SIMOCUTE is one of the main initiatives of the government of Costa Rica to promote the generation and use of high quality data and reliable information for decision making in the public and private sectors, in particular regarding land use monitoring and planning from climate change and various other reporting purposes. The construction of SIMOCUTE has been a participatory process and includes key stakeholders from public and private institutions from the agriculture and environmental sectors, as well as international agencies. A key of the success of SIMOCUTE has been the high level of coordination and integration among these stakeholders. This picture shows an important high level meeting we organized with the leadership of the vice minister of agriculture and also in this meeting we launched the SIMOCUTE official website shown in this next slide. You can find us in the address simocute.go.cr. The primary objective of SIMOCUTE is to provide consistent and coherent information at a national scale on the state and changes in the country's land use, land cover and ecosystems. It includes several coordinated subsystems that will integrate field based data with remote sensing based information to provide comprehensive data that can improve land use decision making and satisfy a variety of national and international reporting requirements. SIMOCUTE is designed as a decentralized system in which the institutions generate their data and information according to their respective mandates and roles based on previously established requirements. An important role of SIMOCUTE is to support the development of protocols, methodologies and tools to standardize and ensure the quality, comparability and compatibility of the information produced. The data from the various institutions are integrated into a common platform that allows users to analyze the data and generate priority reports to respond to various needs both nationally and internationally. If you want to know more about SIMOCUTE, the project building goal capacity to increase transparency in the forest sector or civet forest has generated this two-page case study available in English, Spanish and French to summarize or experience. Also, this case study was included in the e-learning course on forest and transparency under the Paris Agreement with other very interesting case studies from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Bangladesh. I really recommend you to take this course if you wish to better understand the importance of forest-related data collections, analysis and dissemination in meeting the enhanced transparency framework requirements of the Paris Agreement. If you wish to go deeper, I also invite you to read this recent number of Ambientico Magazine, only in Spanish though. However, there you can find 11 articles which describe how has been the construction of this monitoring system and the main contributions that SIMOCUTE has provided to the country so far. These articles are written by interdisciplinary teams of professionals from different institutions and sectors that are leading the development on SIMOCUTE in Costa Rica. Here you can also find a presentation of the system from our soon-to-be or former Minister of Environment and Energy, Carlos Manuel Rodriguez, who has been recently appointed as the new CEO of the Global Environmental Facility. Well, to give an overview of how SIMOCUTE works, I would like to use the information from the e-learning course about the success factors that have enabled its design and implementation. These factors are country ownership and responsibility, institutionalization, legal and policy basics, landscape approach and participatory discussion process. I'll go through them in the next slides, just to go deeper on what has been introduced in this course. Well, a broad range of national and international institutions have supported the development of SIMOCUTE during its design stage, including more than four government, academic, international and other institutions representing especially the environmental and agricultural sectors, but others are included as well. Through the inter-institutional coordination processes, we have ensured that the different actors feel ownership and responsibility for the system, generating more engagement and commitment in their participation. In this list, we just included the acronyms of the institutions and organizations that currently participate in SIMOCUTE. When you can name all of them, that means that you have become an expert in Costa Rica National Resource Management and Monitoring Institutionality. Well, Costa Rica formally initiated the design of SIMOCUTE in 2015 under the coordination of the National Center of Geo-Environmental Information. That is called, we call SEMIGA, and is from the Ministry of Environment and Energy. The roles and responsibilities of the different actors are defined by the institutional arrangements within our legal legislation. Taking this into consideration during the design process, it was defined that the Ministry of Environment and Energy and the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock and the National Geographic Institute should be the leading institutions of the system, as it was defined in our executive decree currently under consultation that will come to regulate the functioning on SIMOCUTE. SIMOCUTE can be thought as a comprehensive integrated system of systems, founded on three interrelated processes, classification or what, the mapping or where, and the inventory and related various trees, that tells us how much. The inventory and mapping processes include monitoring subsystems that use common land use, land cover, and or ecosystem classification systems. Primary subsystems include a sample-based area estimation monitoring system used to monitor the country's land use and land cover through visual interpretation of these attributes from a systematic grid of plots distributed across the country using high-resolution imaginary. Field-based national forest inventory and a mapping subsystem. SIMOCUTE is constructed using the landscape approach as is an old land multipurpose system allowing for the monitoring of natural ecosystem as well as agriculture and biodiversity resources. The work of the various institutions is coordinated to thematic technical workgroups. These figures summarizes the workgroups that are currently active, others will be activated in the future. These working groups are the sample-based area estimation, we call monitoreo por puntos, the land use and land cover monitoring classification system, the national forest inventory where we are supporting our colleagues in the SINAC to develop their next forest inventory of Costa Rica. Also, working table agricultural land coordinated by the Ministry of Agriculture and all their working tables on ecosystems and the mapping technical working group that is coordinated by the Institute of Geographic of Costa Rica. These workgroups have an advisory role and their main functions are to prepare, propose, review and adjust methodologies, indicators, protocols, standards and other tools for generating data and monitoring the landscape through time while ensuring continuous improvement of SIMOCUTE's processes and products. The thematic technical workgroups have a decisive role in SIMOCUTE, in SIMOCUTE's structure as they define the methodologies and processes governing the generation and use of the information. By integrating public institutions, academia, the private sector and international donors, these workgroups become forums for discussion and join networking between sectors to reach consensus while respecting institutional mandates and responsibilities, incorporating scientific and technological contributions and considering the various information needs. Coordinating and moving forward with all these working groups takes a lot of time and effort. Before COVID-19 pandemic, we had a very active agenda involving the meetings of the technical working groups, the advisory coordination committee and regular capacity building activities directed to address different challenges faced during the different stages of the design of SIMOCUTE. Only in 2019, we had 26 of these trainings organized. These are some of the first photos of SIMOCUTE, taking during the first coordination activities and an internship in the United States held in 2016. These activities were organized with support of FAO, US force secretary, and Siva Carbon. Here you can meet the former director of Seniga, Mr. Álvaro Aguilar, holding a cake to celebrate the beginning of what came to be SIMOCUTE. In that time, the name wasn't even defined. Álvaro retired in December 2017 and I started to be the director of Seniga and coordinator of SIMOCUTE since then. Now the dynamics of the meetings have changed considerably due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We have to use virtual platforms in order to organize all of our meetings. Of course, it is not the same. In this way, we cannot share a cake together, but this hasn't stopped us continuing our work while adapting our plans to the current conditions. Well, this pandemic is also affecting the available resources destined to forest protection. The reduction of the tax collection is compromising the resources available for countries' payment for consistent service programs as reporting in this response. An important part of the financing of the PSA program comes from the collection of tax on consumption of fossil fuels. The results of the pandemic have reduced the consumption of fossil fuels within the country. In consequence, less money is getting to the PSA program budget. As you can see, this is not a very sustainable cycle for a forest, especially now that we are planning to have a decarbonized economy. To address these challenges, we need to reduce inefficiencies in all of the aspects related to forest management. An integral and robust monitoring system like SIMOCUTE can help reduce those efficiencies in the monitoring processes, reducing duplicities in the generation, collection, processing and publication of different information products. This means that we need to reduce inefficiencies and SIMOCUTE can provide a very good platform for this. Well, we envision for the near future in SIMOCUTE, I guess Kali wanted to interrupt me because I'm getting out of time, but I just want to say that we really are interested in implementing the NFMS assessment tool. We have new projects to improve data currency and integrate all the reporting processes for different processes in the country. One important aspect that we want to achieve is higher ambition and to achieve higher ambition, we think that we need to generate more transparent data in order to have clear targets and define clear goals and more ambitious goals. Sorry to a little bit more time, but thank you very much for your attention. Thank you so much, Rafael. Don't worry, we'll be asking you many questions coming up, so no worries there. But yes, thank you for the informative overview of the SIMOCUTE system and also for the first sneak peek into the new functionality, which was also a surprise for us, so thank you for sharing that in this form. But I'd like to start off right where we left with Rafael. In your presentation, you mentioned that a unique element as you highlighted that's utilized is the integration of the sectoral data maps and also a harmonized classification system through the three subsystems. And I think you've also mentioned in our discussions that you've been a part of SIMOCUTE, its development since its inception in 2015. So you've seen it grow, but you've also seen it go through its growing pains. So could you share with us what you feel are some of the main values or the true value of this integrated system? And perhaps contrastingly, I would imagine that setting up a system like this comes with many challenges and growing pains, especially on the technical side. So perhaps you can speak to sort of this duality, some of the value, but also some of the growing pains that have come with setting up such an integrated system. Thank you, Khalil. Sure. I mentioned that I started with Seneca and SIMOCUTE in 2017, but this started from before 2015 where it wasn't even planned to name it SIMOCUTE. Actually, to prepare for this presentation, I've been talking to our colleagues about the history of how we have been working to get to where we are right now. Since the beginning, in coordination with Key Institution, it was decided to design a system with a holistic approach, ambitioning to create a robust system that could deliver official information for the whole Apollo sector. And we knew that this consideration implied the construction of an open and participatory process where different stakeholders should be integrated in one standardized system. And these, as you mentioned, to be constructed in conjunction with the different systems that already exist. You can imagine the growing, some growing pains in the process like this. For instance, it takes more time and planification to organize the different dialogue processes and follow up the agreements. However, this has been a huge opportunity to understand each other, learn from each other, and also analyze new and more efficient strategies for doing or monitoring processes. I just want to provide an example. In the past, we had these debates with the environmental and agriculture researcher regarding how was defined, what was the definition of forest in Costa Rica for classification system. This discussion was a very important issue for our colleagues in the agriculture sector and in order to move forward with SIMOCUTE and their participation. In 2019, we're going to have different activities to address this issue. And now, currently, the things have changed and CINAC and the Ministry of Agriculture are exploring ideas to co-develop a map that not only includes types of forests, but also crops and other land uses. This kind of correlation leads to better landscape results and SIMOCUTE is the platform to facilitate that kind of things happening. I think your response really highlights the need for holistic solutions across the landscape. And as we know, land uses, of course, do not operate in isolation, but rather the solutions are also going to come from ministers and ministries going through sort of the participatory process that you've highlighted the SIMOCUTE started with, but also the data speaking to one another is integral. And I was watching a recent webinar with your now former director, Carlos Manuel Rodriguez, the incoming CEO. And he said that really a basic element of protecting our forests, not only for their conservation value, but also their contribution to both the biodiversity and climate crisis is ensuring that we don't work in silos. And I think SIMOCUTE is a really nice example of breaking down those silos. In the same webinar, he also touched on the need for enabling conditions, which comes with the support of good governance and clear roles and responsibilities shared by the various national actors and ministries that are a part of, for example, the SIMOCUTE process. So this next question is also related to a question that was asked by Asuko Okon, and you have to apologize for my pronunciation. But I believe that there is an exciting interministerial decree on the horizon in Costa Rica. And I think it's in its final consultation process and is awaiting endorsement from the various ministries. So perhaps we can start with Rafael first and then we can go to Lucio. But first Rafael, what do you believe will be the impact of this endorsement and how will the decree ensure and even further enhance the delivery of the NFMS system? Thank you, Helene. Well, I think this decree means a huge political backup for the development of SIMOCUTE. This formalizes the joint coordination of this system by the Ministry of Environment and Energy and the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestocks and the National Geographic Institute. And will enable us to move from a design stage to an implementation stage, as we call it, where we will be delivering different information products and expanding the use of our technological platform. This decree establishes an important commitment from the highest political level that will give sustainability to the process and more security to our international stakeholders. We hope that with this decree we can achieve higher level of impacts from the resources and investments that the government and the international agencies are putting into SIMOCUTE. Great. And I think that we can go to Lucio. Lucio, as someone who works across the region, I think your perspective is here is extremely valuable. In your opening presentation, you also touched on this idea of the utility of sort of legal arrangements and offering solutions to some of the barriers that occur while setting up an NFMS system. Perhaps you can share with us, you can reflect how you believe this legal aspects, such as clear roles and responsibilities really contribute to a more robust NFMS. And then perhaps even share some reflections from your work across the Latin American and Caribbean region. Yes, Halil. Thank you. Yes, I think that countries have concentrated their efforts so far for years to solve technical and methodological elements to analyze information from remote sensing and field data. But with the time we observed that one of the main challenges that countries make face was related, for example, with the institutional arrangement and the roles of responsibilities of the different institutions involved in the process to generate information. And this lack of clarity on the roles and responsibility was become a weakness of the national forest monitoring system. The adoption of legal arrangement offered part of the solution to help guarantee the sustainability, to increase the national ownership, this is that's clear in the presentation of Rafael, and also to contribute maybe to ensure financial support, national financial support, and the interoperability of the different functions of the national monitoring system at the country level. So the legal solutions will include elements to articulate these roles and responsibilities of different institutions in relation to the national forest monitoring system, and may also promote the allocation of financial and human resource. This is a, and also a broad experience in the regions with other countries that has also a approach, make this approach to strengthen its national forest monitoring system. Thank you, I think this is very important. I also wanted to give the chance to Rocio, to elaborate a little bit more on her presentation. Rocio, you briefly touched on this NFMS tool as a key deliverable from the Civic Forest Project. And you mentioned that you are currently collaborating with country partners to implement the new tool. And you discussed how it sort of aligns the voluntary guidelines for national forest monitoring, but beyond that it also allows countries to prioritize action to improve national forest monitoring systems. So can you perhaps share some of your experiences with the work being done in pilot countries and how the tool is being utilized currently. Thank you, Halil. Yes, maybe first of all, I would have to say that the tool provides countries a way to assess their national forest monitoring system about key good practices aggregated into three categories institutional arrangement measurement identification and reporting and verification. It facilitates the identification of needs and gaps in order to establish or strengthen in the country's forest monitoring. Therefore, it could be used by countries at various starting points. We have used the tool with the six pilot countries of the project which includes Guatemala, Honduras, Thailand, Laos, Cote d'Ovoire and Uganda. And therefore it's used by other countries that might be interest, of course, up to now we have seen that the tool has facilitated capacity assessment of the system and facilitation of dialogue with key national stakeholders helping to pull their first hand knowledge of a problem or development challenge and identify possible solutions. Let me provide an example. The tool has moved and dedicated efforts toward a sustainable and national forest monitoring system in the last years. This tool has helped to identify institutional arrangement weakness, but also prioritize data sharing protocols as one of the most urgent aspects in the coming months. Therefore, this action will allow data to be more transparent and accessible to a wider audience. Thank you. Back to you. Thank you very much, Rocio. So as you mentioned, the tool identifies alignment under these three broad categories and then further helps to prioritize actions to fill gaps and needs to strengthen forest monitoring. And I think that given the time I think this can lead us to perhaps our final question for Rafael and bring us full circle, because I think on one hand we have this extremely positive case study from Costa Rica, where there seems to be not a lot of support, but international collaboration, international funding, advanced technical capacity, but overall an understanding from the country but also its citizens of the importance of doing things sort of in an integrated and streamlined manner. So for the final question, I wanted to go to Rafael and ask Rafael, where do you see the opportunities then for collaborating with the cipid forest projects or how do you foresee the potential use of a tool like the NFMS tool used to further bolster the work that you're already doing, although great work you're already doing in Costa Rica and forest monitoring. Thank you, Halil. Actually, we consider this new NFMS tool as a very valuable tool to evaluate Simucute with an international standard and identify the gaps where we can keep improving. Personally, I have already assessed the tool and it got me thinking a lot about where we are and why it still needs to be done. But we would like to start a formal process with an open participation of partners in Simucute in order to generate an integrated assessment and translate it to actions in the near future. Also, we want to work with CVIT in promoting the use of the tool and share our experience in order to help other countries address the same challenges we have had in the creation of our monitoring system. That's great to hear Rafael, thank you. So everyone, I hate to disrupt a good thing, especially a fruitful dialogue, but I know that we're very quickly running out of time. So as we prepare to wrap up, I just want to say a very quick thank you to our panelists for this rich dialogue, especially those from Costa Rica who are joining us and really we've spent majority of our hour together sharing experiences from Simucute. But I think that we have much more that we can learn together and hopefully Rafael, as you mentioned, this only marks the beginning of a much longer and comprehensive dialogue together. So to wrap up and send us on our way today, I'd like to welcome Mr. Julian Fox, the team leader of the National Forest Monitoring System, to say some final remarks. Julian, to you. Thanks, Khalil. Well, what a great webinar. I've really enjoyed it actually, but as FAO, we're really honored to accompany countries and forest stakeholders on their journey toward more transparent forest data, which is really the backbone of the Paris Agreement for the forest sector. I mean, for forest data, FAO's starting point is the Voluntary Guidelines for National Forest Monitoring, as agreed with the FAO member countries. It advocates for multi-purpose national forest monitoring systems, and that's why this is such a fantastic example. I encourage you to use the publication, which has now also become integrated into the NFMS assessment tool developed under the Sibet Forest Project that Rossio has provided the link to. So I wanted to just pick up on some of the wonderful points I've heard during this hour, particularly how Simacote is such an excellent example of a multi-purpose monitoring system, supporting the provision of data for reporting, but also national needs for decision-making and land management. And I'd like to highlight four key elements that I've heard today that really impressed me about Simacote and I think from which other countries can learn. Simacote provides really transparent, reliable and credible data. You know, that key data provision function for international reporting, for measurement reporting and verification, and other reporting needs that now transition into the enhanced transparency framework at the Paris Agreement. And as Raphael said, they do this by developing protocols, methodologies and tools to standardize, you know, and ensure the quality, comparability and compatibility of the information produced, which is really important for reporting. Raphael gave us a sneak preview of the new portal and the system makes data accessible to national and international stakeholders, which is so important. You know, geospatial data documentation, everything that stakeholders can need, I think particularly at the national level and as many national stakeholders here with us today. It's essential that people are able to follow their country's progress, get behind the ministries that are working on their systems. And it's fantastic that it also allows users to create their own data and generate their own reports, which is really powerful. My third point is that it produces very relevant data for multiple needs. I mean, it has this key function to provide data for forest and land management in Costa Rica with cross-sectoral integration, which is in fact extremely rare for a forest monitoring system for forests and agriculture. All the Apollo sectors, as we say in technical jargon, I mean agriculture, forestry and other land uses. And on this note, we have an upcoming FAO publication called Better Data Better Decisions Towards Impactful Forest Monitoring. And in this publication, we're really happy to detail through several case studies how relevant forest monitoring data can be catalytic in improving decision-making and land management. And this example of Simacote where they've been integrated data across agriculture and forestry to support decision-making for both sectors is really powerful because forestry and agriculture need to be considered together, right? When making land management decisions, they're not mutually exclusive. So that's why I think, yeah, and also the strong participatory and consultative process that would have been a huge burden for Costa Rica, but it's just so valuable now that the final product is there and it's multi-sectoral and has that broad buying from the stakeholders. I think the most important thing that I noticed is that it's going to be a sustainable system. It's super exciting to hear Rafael mention that a decree is being consulted. And as Lucio said, an institutionalized national forest monitoring system, a part of official government structures is just essential for the sustainability of this valuable data that's in forming decision-making and reporting. And I'll quickly mention another upcoming FAO publication, Legal Frameworks for Sustainable National Forest Monitoring Systems. I mean, we really need to strengthen the legal basis, the institutional arrangements for these systems to make sure that they're sustainable into the future. So in summary, I mean, as FAO, we're really honored to sit with Costa Rica for an hour and also work with Costa Rica in the future on the continuous improvement of Simacote. And particularly, I think this is a fantastic opportunity for South-South triangular cooperation between Costa Rica and the other countries that are present here today. And maybe in my closing comment, I would like to echo Rafael's statement that high levels of transparency can facilitate high levels of ambition. I mean, this is really important. I think our shared vision is that transparent, reliable, relevant, accessible and sustainable national forest monitoring systems can support climate action on the ground. You know, as we've seen here today in the excellent example of Costa Rica and that continuous improvement can support higher levels of ambition, which is so desperately needed at this critical moment for mankind. So thank you very much to Rafael and Costa Rica. Thank you very much for your valuable time. And back to Khalil. Have a fantastic day, everybody. Thanks so much, Julian, for these rich final remarks. And of course, noting all the very key resources that are also available. I think Emily has done her best to pop those into the chat box. But if colleagues aren't able to find them, we'll make sure that we send it in a follow-up email. But last thing from my side, I see that we have many questions that have populated the Q&A box. Our technical colleagues have done their best to answer as many of them as possible. But just to note, we have taken down and we will be trying our best to respond to as many of the relevant questions as possible. So we will send those in follow-up in the coming weeks. But I think that that brings us to the end of our webinar today. I think we're about five minutes over, but that's okay. So a big thanks to all of you for joining us today from the CBIT Forest Team at FAO, from the regional and country offices, and from our colleagues at the Ministry of Environment and Energy. We really wish you a lovely remainder of the day, and that is all from our side. So just wishing you a great day and take care, everyone.