 Okay, good morning everybody. I think we have a small audience here because Kofo continues, but I hope we have a large audience online. So my name is Julian Fox, I'm from the Forestry Division and I am the team leader of the National Forest Monitoring Team and this morning our job is to get you excited about data and digital innovation for forestry. We'll do this with some presentations from FAO member countries, Ethiopia and Indonesia on their work on forest data and how they're using digital innovation to build robust national forest monitoring systems and how these systems are helping them achieve their forest goals. The forest goals we have been discussing a lot this week, reducing deforestation and degradation, restoring forests and enhancing sustainable forest management. You will then hear about the latest digital innovations coming from FAO Forestry Division to help you, the member countries, create better data to achieve your forest goals from FAO's Open Forest Initiative to CEPAL to potential applications of blockchain. We hope the session will inspire you. You know there's a myth that the foresters are not the most innovative people. We tend to hang out in the forest but I think our collective objective this morning is to prove this myth wrong. We are innovative and you will see many examples this morning of how we are using digital innovation and data to achieve the forest goals that we've been discussing this week. Actually we have so much to present on data and digital innovation. We have a full session. So without further ado I would have invited Ms Tina Vahanan, the Deputy Director of the Forestry Division to provide some opening remarks. But as you know, Kofo is ongoing and Tina is busy in the plenary. So I will briefly present Tina's presentation if we can go to the first presentation which I see right here. Actually I have control. Fantastic. So there is a Kofo information note on this exact topic. It describes in fairly dry terms what we are talking about today and I think our job today is to colour this information note with examples from countries, some exciting new possibilities and get you all excited. But there is the information note that is available to member countries and you are welcome to read that as background to this event. I mean digital innovation in FAO led forestry data collection reporting and dissemination contributes to our strategic framework which is new and the science and innovation strategy and the strategy on climate change which are all new and FAO broadly sees digital innovation as a key accelerator of the organisation. I can drive it from here. So I think as we all know relevant, accurate, up to date and transparent information on forest contributes to better reporting, policy formulation and decision making at global, national and local levels. The classic saying you cannot manage what you cannot measure. At the global levels there are many examples of digital innovation in reports that are published by the forestry division, such as the global forest resources assessment, the FALSTAT forestry, FAO yearbook of forest products, the global plan of action and the state of the world's forest genetic resources reports. FAO's work in capacity development at different scales includes support on this, on reporting, on forest monitoring, on measurement reporting and verification and the generation of local data. The development of tools and platforms and you will see in a minute the forestry division has been leading on this across FAO, things like the open forest initiative, the open access FRA platform for the first time, the hand in hand geospatial platform have provided new opportunities for foresters and practitioners to leverage the best available methods, data for forest and land measurement and monitoring. So some current and forthcoming work on digital innovation, these are the tools that we have under open forest. I wasn't expecting this slide but you'll see them there, eight wonderful tools and we'll talk a bit, I'll talk a bit more about this in a moment. We have arena and I'll introduce some of the new concepts in arena which is our cloud-based platform to support national forest inventory. We'll hear about CEPAL which is our cloud-based geospatial processing platform and just to show you the online portal for the Global Forest Resources Assessment which is of course one of the forestry division's key products. We are not resting though, now we turn in to support the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration and from the forestry division we are leading the work on monitoring progress and you'll hear a bit more about that. FAO has developed a hand-in-hand geospatial platform which brings together I think over a million data layers across the different technical divisions of FAO as well as tools for the members and it's been quite a revolution in the last two years under the leadership of the chief economist, Maximo Terreiro that this working in close collaboration with the IT division and all technical divisions to make this platform a reality and yeah just to mention I mean exciting moment in FAO that all the work around open data, open source tools and platforms is now becoming mainstreamed and we call these digital public goods and FAO has formally joined the Digital Public Goods Alliance to formalize this across the organization. So some future aspects of course is to take the full potential of these possibilities to support transparent reporting of forest level statistics at all levels, supporting their strategy on climate change and continuing to build that science-based evidence which forest management so desperately depends on. From the division we'll continue developing proven tests and modern innovative technologies under the open forest initiative, the hand-in-hand geospatial platform for forest data collection and dissemination and what we call the firm, the framework for ecosystem restoration monitoring platform for restoration monitoring and we'll do a lot of capacity development as we develop and operationalize these tools. So thank you very much for joining us. I am without further ado I would like to get straight into the first presentation and invite Mr. Heru Zebrala Ahmed who's the director of forest resources and assessment and monitoring from Ethiopia to speak about forest resources and assessment and monitoring in Ethiopia. I invite you to the podium Heru. Thank you very much. Thank you very much Julianne Fox. Good morning. Just my presentation focused on experience of Ethiopia on using these open forest tools for land use, land cover and forest monitoring. Here are the three areas of applications that we have applied these open forest tools. The first one is the National Forest Inventory, second for mapping, third for sample-based area installation without mapping. Out of these world-class tools of open forest, most of them we have been applying these tools as you see, the ticked ones. For example, for the National Forest Inventory we applied two of them, collect for data collection and data entry and open forest calc for data analysis, including cycle. For activity data we have been applying these tools, these very special tools, SEPAL and collectors online together with Google Earth Engine. Of course, some four years before we have been using collectors, but now I think the collectors online is the advanced version of collectors, so we stick to using collectors online. Here are some products so far we exercised. For example, for these periods, we produce some forest change maps and forest cover maps for the current years, and on the other hand we produce some land use, land cover maps, change maps, forest cover change maps, forest cover and land use, land cover maps for current years. All these maps are produced using these tools. Let us see, for example, say application of SEPAL. For SEPAL, we use three functionalities. For example, image preprocessing and mosaicking, which is the most important and time-saving activity using the traditional way of mosaicking. And the next one is training data collection, other functionality that we applied for these two analysis. One is the first is national, the second is for red plus monitoring. The second means the map with the right on the right hand side. And the third, the classification algorithm or the classification functionality of the SEPAL, and we produced maps like I presented before. We followed very important approach or we followed the approach of GFI guiding principle number one, forest mosaicing. I called this principle VVIP, very, very important principle to mean, because it states that when mapping forest or land use, land cover change, special change, it is generally more accurate to detect change by comparing images rather than comparing maps. Experts throughout the world, I think, and in Ethiopia also, most remote sensing experts detect change using mostly comparing two maps, which is actually not wrong, but less accurate because when we are comparing two images, two maps for detecting a change, we are multiplying error, error of each of the maps. So the most important principle is this one. So in order to realize this principle, we used SEPAL. As far as I know, SEPAL is the ideal tool for this. It is a powerful tool. That is why I stated there it is a magic tool. Yes, it is for me, it is a magic because it compares images. So let us see the interface. I don't want to bother you with just putting technical things, but how we have been applying the principle. Imagine the principle is comparing image to image. The pictures at the bottom for 2018 and 2020 are not maps, they are images. If you look at carefully around the cursor, there is a change. For example, forest land converted to cropland. So the algorithm detected well as you see the red one is the change area. The same procedure for forest land remaining forest land, the stable class, when we classify. As you see it is clearly captured the forest remaining forest. When I go to the other two collectors online, we applied for the two analysis that I presented you before. For one, the left hand side is the national assessment. The second is the red plus project areas, monitoring for that area. We collected the most important applicability for map accuracy assessment. The applicability of the collectors online is for map accuracy assessment and for sample based area estimation. So here we used to collect reference data on this tool. The second application of collectors online is for sample based area estimation without mapping. This year, before a week, we concluded data collection of some 93,000 plots. It is a huge plot number for one province called Oromi original state. This is for the sake of determining the relative performance of administrative units below the province, which we call zones. So mapping all four, these all 21 zones will take much time, much resources and so on. So we selected this sample based area estimation for that purpose. So for this purpose, we created two collectors online interfaces or platforms because CEO can't afford samples beyond 50,000. That is why 45 and 48,000. We created for two platforms. In general, we created so far many projects, CEO institutions and projects under them. All these, for example, these are the three ones. I am an admin for these all tools, platforms, and there are many users or data collectors, 31, 5 and 16 for this three. And here are for example survey questions. For example, here we have four survey questions. The first one is the displayed one and so on. And then we have been interpreting each of the points. When we come to the advantage of these tools, I don't know, I have, I don't have much words about to talk about the advantages. They have been helping us for collecting relevant to the transparent information on forest which helps at better reporting and decision making. But at least I have one picture to compare. Believe me, this picture is true. This distinction or difference is true. I have, I took some time to fetch this figure because I was very happy and I am strongly satisfied on these tools. They are, so without these tools, it is almost a burden or a drunk work. Otherwise, using these tools, life is simple in terms of remote sensing. The reason or the, the success, the reason for behind the success of all these success is not only the provision of these tools, but most importantly the technical assistance that we received, especially from FAO forestry division, geospatial team and spatial informatics groups, US forest service and the like. To be honest, it looks like just we are working in the same office, in the same building, in the same floor, in the same just room. I can't say that. I can't just describe like that. I mean from our side and from these partners. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. You're very kind and I really like the reference to CEPOL as a magic tool. That's wonderful. Now we're really honored to accompany countries such as Ethiopia on your journey toward better data. So thank you so much for that presentation. I would like now to introduce Dr Belinda Magono Arunawati, who is the Director of the Forest Inventory and Monitoring of Forest Resources from the Ministry of Environment and Forestry of Indonesia. I invite you to the podium, Belinda, to present how your robust national forest monitoring system is supporting Indonesia's ambitious plans. Thank you, Belinda. Okay. Thank you, everyone. First of all, I would like to thank to have this opportunity. So I would like to start with the presentation, maybe a bit different, what the experience have by Ethiopia. The title of our presentation is related to the robust national monitoring system, specifically for the Forlunetsing 2030. As a couple of days ago, Indonesia released the Indonesian State Forest for year 2022. That is the book that actually explaining about our condition of forest resources. So actually, by releasing this data, this book, we also would like to highlight that we are focusing also in trying to be part of reducing the emission from our earth. So with this, I would like also to start that this is something related to the specific condition of Indonesia. We use the term of forest cover. That's the one that we generated from the remote sensing. And the other one is about forest area or forest status. That is actually the one that designed it for forestry purposes. I just want to highlight because I think many countries have the specific condition like this, too. Next, this is something related general policy action for Forlunetsing. There are a couple, but I will only highlight the last one, the strengthening Forlunetsing database. So that's the one that actually why we are here. Because in terms of the innovation, we also have to deal with the data and information. You don't need to read all of this, but this is give information that actually when we deal with the policy of Forlunetsing, that is forest and other land use, in order to be seen by year 2030, we have couple of activity mitigation action. But with all of this activity, we need to have very strong data and information. It could be from the remote sensing and also combined by Mr. Raman. As you see here, actually, there are two main data that we deal with the climate change. The first is about the activity data. And then the second one is about the emission factor. The activity data is actually the one that we generated from the remote sensing. We don't use directly the tools provided by FAO, but we build our system also with the support from the FAO. A couple, maybe 25 years ago or 30 years ago, we work together in establishing this remote sensing monitoring system as a prototype. And the system is actually also accompanied with the National Forest Inventory, so the activity on the ground to also collect all of the data and information in providing the information on the emission factor. All of this activity is also developed together with the FAO. So thank you, FAO, for all of this, with the prototype and so on. But nowadays, we already have the system under the government, running operationally, and we call it National Forest Monitoring System. And the system is actually the one we would like to support to achieve the volunets in 2030. So we have 12 mandatory mitigation actions. That is the one that actually we want to support using the data and information we have so far. This is how we produce the activity data by using remote sensing. This morning, I have also a technical meeting, and I told our colleague here with NFAO that actually for Indonesia, we don't work together. So collaboration is also one of the key. The collaboration here is not only with many donors or many stakeholders outside, but it's also within the country itself. So in term of this monitoring system, the Ministry of Environment and Forestry doesn't work alone, but it's also work with other government institutions. This picture here is actually just explaining the color, explaining how many institutions that actually be part of the activity. And all of this flow is actually producing what we call it the land cover map of Indonesia. It's 23 classes right now, because we use also the visual one, so it's not directly automatic. But while we're doing that, that is also because of, depend on the need in the country. This is telling the story about the history, why we have the 23 classes. There are six periods we've been through so far. And the first period, we work closely with the FAO. And then we have also tried to improve everything every period. And now this, we also use technology, innovation with the vegetation. That is actually the alert for change, deforestation, reforestation and so on. And also something related with the monthly burn scar. I will talk about this one. And also related to providing uncertainty data, uncertainty analysis for the monitoring system. This is how we see from the National Forest Monitoring System. In Indonesian language, we call it Simontana. Maybe FAO have SEPAL, we have this one. This system actually provides all the statistical information every year. And also giving the information related to land cover trajectory. So we know it was from what and now changed into something else. There is also a tools about the deforestation, deforestation, that is actually the deforestation early warning system. We are still also working with this and I'm open to work with FAO also to make it perfect. And the underneath is actually the result about the deforestation in Indonesia. You can see in the past when we have not yet technology, seems like the deforestation is very, very high. It could be because of the situation is like that, but it could be also because of the technology is not proper enough. But when we see after years of 2000, everything is getting better because the technology is suitable enough to provide proper information. This is actually the result we have from the graph. If you want to see the digital appearance like this, on the top is the year of the data and the underneath is actually about the accuracy, the accuracy of the information itself. From 90, it was three years and then start 2011 becoming yearly because we use Landsat. And Landsat is becoming free when in 2009. That is also the reason why we have the system becoming annual. And for this, we also open to work with many partners to improve the quality of the information we have. And now try to attach with about the forest fire. Maybe the underneath, that is the result of how we monitor the forest fire in Indonesia. Actually the specific system to count the area of the forest fire start in 2015. But then we try to make it backward using the same methodology using the archive data. So we establish the method and try to make it the data available. And you can see here, that is the series of the forest fire in Indonesia. And there is a different about the mineral soil and the pit line. So we can see the different color of the graph showing, maybe it's too small, but I hope you can see the different. And the pie chart underneath is actually explaining that the fire is not directly linked with the forest fire. Back in the country, the fire could be on non-forest area and also the forest area. We can see it's only 4% so far on the forest area. And the other one is about non-forested area. This is related to the national forest inventory, the one that provides the emission factor. So we have the systematic sampling for the entire country. It's about 300 plots so far that is a systematic one. And we are still working with FAO how to make it more effective, more efficient. Because it's so costly to have about 3,000 plots systematically along the country. And we have to measure repeatedly every five years. But yearly, we also try to get this one. We are working on it, how to make it more effective and efficient. And provide the emission factor that link directly to the data activity. This is the site result from the NFI, giving the map of standing volume. That is one of the output we have for Indonesia Forest. And the other one is the standing biomass. So this is give information for us to know where is the high biomass and where is the low biomass. And this is the last slide I think. This is to say that innovation. Yes, we use remote sensing. We have GIS also to provide so many thematic maps for the country. But we need also to have something in how to combining all the geospatial maps together to the decision making a process. So we make the data all available. Here we use a technology. We try to make a note so every institution in the country is also connected to each other. There is a concept of custodian data. There is also concept of producing data. So who create, who make the data, who will update, how frequent and so on. That is one of the approach that we use so far. And we already have the national geospatial information network in the country and hopefully we will improve the quality of this as soon as possible. With this challenge, this is just give what the problem we have so far. It's because the Indonesia is quite large country and about because the environmental and forest management planning is required. The financial resources, I think everybody have that problem. The human resources, so capacity building is also the most important research. Sometimes if we are dealing with the operational, we don't have time to do the research. So we need to have the partner to do the research exactly following what the need. That's the thing. And also the consolidation and the coordination and also the need for monitoring, reporting, verifying and also controlling. With this, I would like to close the presentation. Hopefully it's not too long. Thank you Julian. Thank you everyone. Thank you. Thank you very much Belinda. I found that really inspirational actually that you demonstrated that continuous improvement has led to higher levels of accuracy and transparency and higher levels of ambition. And now you have demonstrated how that helped you in the past. And now you have this incredible following net sync 2030 plan. So congratulations to you in Indonesia. Belinda actually needs to go dash to the airport at 11. So with that in mind, I would like to pause and take any burning questions from the audience because we're doing a great job on time keeping. So would anybody like to ask a question to either Ethiopia or Indonesia or should we keep steaming on ahead? I see no hands. So let's keep steaming ahead. Thank you Belinda. I think, sorry, you're going to get quite a bit of me today, unfortunately. So I am back and I'm going to say a few words about the forestry divisions work. And I think you've already seen a very nice application in Ethiopia from Dr. Haru. So how do we work as the forestry division? Well, we have two teams that really work in synergy. We have the global forest resources assessment that compiles. You all know the fraud. It's one of our key activities in the division that compiles all the national statistics about forests. And then we have my team, the national forest monitoring systems team that supports governments at the national level on national level needs, national level data production to support their national forest goals. And we really it's a very nice. I see there's a circular economy. You know, we both teams, we use the capacity development digital innovation and partnership to improve the quality of the data in the countries to help them achieve their forest goals, which then ends up in the fraud and hopefully provides good news, such as the example provided by Belinda today. My team, we support satellite monitoring systems, national forest inventory as presented by Belinda and greenhouse gas inventories. So bringing together the field inventory and the remote sensing data into an inventory and the forest reference emission level, which has been a, I'll talk about in a moment actually. So as I mentioned before, we have open forest. It was launched in 2011 at the time. It was one off, if not the first open source project in FAO. And I wasn't me that launched it, but colleagues that did were trial blazes, I would say. The beautiful thing about it now is that it's it's I term it as it's future proofed because over its 11 year history, different donors have contributed, different projects have existed. But because it's all open source, it continues to grow by itself. And you know, the countries are picking up different pieces. Some countries take their own take this open court code, sorry, and integrated into the national forest monitoring systems. And it's really involved from quite a small open source project in 2011 now to cover all elements of forest data collection analysis and reporting, both field based and remote sensing. And it's amazing to see in the last two years that this approach has been mainstreamed across FAO. So open source digital public goods, and now a core, a core work area of FAO from being quite an isolated project in the forestry division, very innovative at the time. Now we see this, these tools and the approach is really mainstreamed across FAO. So we have many users, many countries. And I mean, we don't intend to replace what a country has, we just tend we intend to fill in the gaps, those specific needs through technical assistance. And these digital tools allow us do the technology transfer really effectively. It also has removed dependencies. You know, some development projects would would build computer labs would buy expensive software. Now we don't have to buy expensive software. So there's no dependencies in the countries that's all free and open, and has a has a life shelf of its own. This is a really nice use case of how these tools have have accelerated progress under Red Plus, which I hope I don't have to spell out the acronym and I hope you all know what it is. But under the UNFCCC, we've seen incredible progress over the last 10 years in in countries been able to submit forest reference levels. Many of these countries, this is the first detailed forest report that they've submitted to an international convention. So it's no small feat. And we against these reference emission levels, we have 27 Red Plus results. And I mean, from FAO, we're just delighted that that 90% of these countries used our tools, right? We they use them to fill the gaps. They use them to to help them create good data and then report to the convention. That is quite remarkable. And this isn't just hot air. These these are then assessed by the UNFCCC. And we have over 11 billion tons of CO2 reductions or enhancements under Red Plus. And the nice segue to the next session, this has helped the countries mobilise almost half a billion dollars worth of climate finance under the GCF. And every all this movement is really accelerating our forest goals, what we've been talking about this week, reducing deforestation and forest degradation, enhancing forest carbon stocks and facilitating sustainable forest management. So now we turn to a new decade, and it's the decade on ecosystem restoration. So one really nice thing from my point of view is that we're taking all this knowledge, the tools, the capacity, and we're turning it to monitoring the progress of ecosystem restoration. And we're doing this by building on FAO's hand in hand geospatial platform. We've created a version of the hand in hand geospatial platform on FAO's core geospatial architecture called the Firm, the framework for ecosystem restoration monitoring. And it's really a nice integrated platform for monitoring the progress of the decade. And you'll hear much more about this, I hope in the coming years. But we are building up to having good area based data for the progress of the UN decade and also hopefully supporting the CBD's global biodiversity framework target two, which is going to in December hopefully agree on a really ambitious target for restoration under the CBD toward 2030. So one of our core areas of support, I think right from when FAO was first created was support on national forest inventory. And this continues as a core area of work for us. And these are the different steps and that we're currently supporting many countries, including Indonesia on different steps in this cycle. Our tool for supporting national forest inventory has evolved. As we know now, it's not so easy to install software on a computer. So we're trying to move our tools to the cloud and open forest arena is an example of that where we have taken open forest collect, open forest calc, and we put them into this cloud based environment that secure to allow the countries to do things without having to install any software. And the open forest arena is evolving really nicely at the moment to support. I think that that core work area of FAO the national forest inventory design analysis and reporting. So thank you very much. I invite you to take what you need from our catalog of tools and platforms. They're all freely available and open. And I also invite you to request that technical assistance from us to help with the technology transfer. I think we have a very nice message from US Forest Service. If we can key that up, please. Thank you. Should I push play? I'm Tracy from the US Department of Agriculture's Forest Service in the forest inventory and analysis program. I'm here to share my perspective and experience with the open forest tools for forest monitoring. So why are monitoring tools so important? Forest ecosystems are dynamic systems and the data and tools that help us understand these systems are critical. They help us inform sustainable forest management practices and achieve the United Nations established sustainable development goals. Forest monitoring data allows us to quantify forest characteristics such as the status, diversity and historic and future trends. Monitoring data can also be used to track changes and to set benchmarks, standards and guidelines for conservation and management practices. These strategic goals stress the importance of sharing available data and tools to generate reliable, timely and repeatable estimates of forest attributes. With open source tools such as the open forest suite of tools provided by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, we can more easily quantify and analyze our forest at a global scale and begin to make more informed decisions across the planet. Open source tools like open forest focus on flexibility, transparency, accessibility and lower cost. Because open source tools are not proprietary, they by definition promote open collaboration, sharing and innovation, thus improving accuracy and reliability. The open forest suite of tools provide a user-friendly platform with consistent data collection analysis and reporting, along with making accessible a wealth of remotely sensed data. This gives the needed advantages to those with less resources, allowing countries to focus on collecting high-quality data on the ground or from the sky, rather than focus on expensive tool development and maintenance. Plus, open forest was designed to help countries quantify forest change and degradation across their region. That means it was designed to help them meet specific reporting requirements of the IPCC and RED initiatives for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Together with the Global Forest Observation Initiative, they provide easy access to tools for measuring, analyzing and validating data, increasing efficiency and accountability for developing countries. The USDA Forest Service Forest Inventory Analysis Program has been working in collaboration with open forest staff. The collaboration has on a high level led to valuable discussions about diverse forests and unique situations across the globe. We share goals to generate more precise estimates across different populations. We also share expertise to create reliable open-source tools. This interchange has resulted in new techniques and development as we encounter and support different sampling designs, estimation strategies and data sources. We plan to take advantage of the open forest tools for our estimation needs throughout the U.S. We look forward to continuing the collaboration for years to come. I appreciate your attention and thanks for listening. Thank you very much to the U.S. Forest Service. It's been a collaboration, I think, right from the start of mutual learning and we will continue to work closely with the U.S. Forest Service. Now, you're going to hear a bit more about some of the really exciting work the Forestry Division is doing. I would like to introduce Yelena Feingold, a Forestry Officer in the Forestry Division, to get you excited about some of the latest innovation in FAO's Zepal platform. Over to you, Yelena. Thank you, Julian, and thank you, colleagues. Thank you so much, Melinda. Thank you for the wonderful presentation, Melinda, Hiro and other colleagues, and thank you all for joining here. Today, I'd like to present Zepal and uncover some of the magic of this platform. Zepal empowers countries, communities, and individuals to have access to powerful cloud computing for monitoring forest and land resources. Let's start with a peek into the platform and uncover how the platform works for some of the work that Hiro showed and that I'll show in this presentation. Zepal is free and open source and enables anyone, anywhere to sign up and have access to satellite imagery over their country or any area in the world and perform analysis on that geospatial data to meet their needs and their context. It doesn't require any particular hardware or software. As Julian mentioned, it's a web platform, so you only need a computer or even smartphone and just an internet connection to access. The objectives of Zepal are to democratize data and break the barriers of access to that data and methodologies to process that data. To use Zepal, you don't need to be a researcher or a developer to have access to the latest science. And often, there is a lot of already existing great information provided by scientists out there, such as global maps on forest and deforestation. However, these global maps often don't meet local, don't match local circumstances and don't meet national definitions. So what we're doing with Zepal is making that data and the algorithms that are behind those global data sets accessible. So people in governments can produce their own data. So Zepal doesn't provide any ready-made statistics or maps. It's the users that then produce those maps and statistics and they are the owners of them. And I think he showed a really excellent example of this. And here I also have an example from Republic of Congo and in many other countries are using Zepal, transforming these signals and images with local knowledge into maps and statistics of forest change to use in national forest monitoring systems and for Red Plus reporting. The tools in Zepal are co-developed with our partners and with countries. In Indonesia, there have been great investments in restoring the precious peatlands. And we've been working with Indonesian government agencies to develop and pilot tools on monitoring the restoration of those peatlands by mapping soil moisture and groundwater levels over time and comparing them with field data from the peatlands to monitor the progress. And I know fires have been a particularly hot topic here at Kofo and also globally fires have a lot of significance. And in Zepal, we've developed some tools to monitor fires combining alerts of active fires with Nikfi planets high resolution daily imagery. And we can see here an active fire burning which we can detect or we can go back in time and see historical fires and then assess the impact of those fires and the effects of those fires by mapping the burn severity and land cover changes. Land degradation and monitoring is another important subject for reporting on SDG 15. And we've been working in Cox Bazaar refugee camp in Bangladesh to map some forest degradation, identify forest degradation sites where they've then implemented restoration activities and sustainable forest management that then can be used by these extremely vulnerable communities. And importantly in reversing land degradation, then it's important to prioritize where to have forest restoration activities. And in support of the UN decade on ecosystem restoration, we've developed a decision support tool for forest restoration planning called C plan which uses both socioeconomic and biophysical geospatial data that represent restoration benefits and costs. And we have a really excellent example where Vietnam is piloting this tool and using it to create suitability maps that are an output of the tool but using their local maps and data into that tool which is very easy to use and then taking those maps to the field to assess where to plan their forest restoration activities. So that's the presentation on CPL and I just like to finish it off saying that open technology like CPL facilitates better data and informed decision making. And I invite you to try out this maybe not so magic platform but I love that description magic platform CPL for yourself. The URL is there CPL.io. And thank you very much. Thank you very much Elena. It's incredible to see how the platform evolves for new use cases as our needs change, there's critical land monitoring needs are forever evolving. I would now like to invite Remy Danuzio, another forestry officer. We've heard a lot this week about deforestation degradation and the drivers of those processes. And he has a really nice use case for the Congo base and over to you Remy. Thank you Julian. Hi everybody. So I'm Remy. I'm also working with Elena and Julian in the forestry division. We've heard a little bit about examples at the country level. I would like to give you one short story about how we can apply those tools at the largest scale at regional level and how we've implemented this in the Congo basin. So somewhere about two and a half years ago, the Central African Forest Initiative, which is one of the probably the biggest donor in the Congo basin for the forestry sector, came to us and asked if we could try to update the numbers and around deforestation degradation and try to reach a consensus around what were the driving forces behind those. And we told them if you wanted to reach consensus on this, we could certainly help using tools that we have, but we would need to have those tools used by the countries and produce locally. And we also insisted on having an approach that would be inclusive of many different sectors. So academia, civil society, governments and other actors. So we embarked on this and we took up the challenge to produce a system that could monitor deforestation and degradation at the regional level. So that's six countries we're talking about using those accessible and open source tools. So how did we do that in practice? We've heard a lot about SEPAL and we've heard a lot about the open forest tools and yet again this is where we use the tools. So we kind of gathered all the good practices and experience we have had over the past 10 years of setting up natural forest mentoring system into a consistent package. And we use those approaches that Hyrule mentioned earlier that don't use just single maps and single discrete points in time, but use everything and look at the dense time series of satellite imagery. And by doing this, we managed to map both deforestation and degradation of forests. And we implemented all this within the SEPAL platform using the amazing cloud computing capabilities that are out there. We also took a huge advantage of the collector's online platform for calibration and validation data collection. So yeah, we really made sure that those tools were set up and developed so that we could work at that scale, which is again around half a billion hectares that are covering those six countries of the Congo basin. The second ingredient I think we put in this successful story is the use of unprecedented detailed satellite imagery data through the NICFI program. NICFI is the Norwegian claim and initiative for forests. And NICFI provided through an exceptional contract with Planet and other commercial partners data to the whole world publicly available. And the Planet data at really high spatial resolution, five meters, and really high cadence, basically updated daily, could help us identify drivers and validate very swift and dynamic processes such as degradation, especially in Congo basin where things tend to recover quickly and to regain. So things go quick and you need very high cadence data to detect those things. So that was the second ingredient was amazing data put into the set. And the third one is also echoing what we've been saying about digital public goods. It's really making sure that this was a country-driven process and through inclusion of many actors. We started this activities in full during the pandemics era. And we actually took benefit of somehow, we took the opportunity of being everybody locked down to fully develop and improve our online didactic material, ways to communicate with the government and the agencies. And we set up a really virtual environment to both do capacity building and to implement activities. And that also echoes what Hyrule was saying earlier. Kind of feel like we're in the same room and working together. And I think this somehow was really good experience that we could manage to deploy those tools completely remotely. And when times got better, so that's the images you have at the bottom, we managed earlier this year to go back to the field and start doing some proper field verification of some things and gathering social data, which is also a good thing. So we had really active WhatsApp groups that are still active in the different countries, a very strong panel of experts that helped with creating the data, validating it. And you can see here the distribution of people in the countries. Right. So we set up those tools. We use them at large level. We produce maps, we produce statistics. The results are currently under peer review. They are actually accessible as a blueprint. So feel free to check it out on the internet. One of the very interesting things we have had is a message on trends of deforestation degradation. We also identified the drivers and the very strong importance of the rural complex in those drivers. I invite you to check them out and see what those results look like. This is, no, I had another slide, but it looks like it's not there. Okay. Well, I had another slide that mentioned where all data is available and we have a public website that is showing all those, that is providing accessibility to the data, to the protocols, to the results, to the recordings of the different didactic sessions we had. And yeah, maybe we can post that out in the chat somehow. Anyway, thank you very much for your attention. Thank you very much, Remy. Well, in the spirit of innovation, I think our next presenter will talk more about a frontier technology, something that is going to become exciting for sustainable forest management in the next decade. And in this spirit of blockchain, I will pass straight to Jacqueline Bolt from Vangeningen University in Research to get us excited about this potential. Thank you Jacqueline. Thank you for this opportunity. This is actually my only slide and it's actually an invitation to you to join our event on blockchain for forest this afternoon. It's from two to five PM and you can still register. If you cannot make it to all the sessions, you can still access the information up to a month after the event. So you can download materials, briefs, publications. You can also watch back the recordings of this afternoon. So that's nice. Let me introduce myself. I'm Jacqueline Bolt. I'm a business innovator at Wageningen Environmental Research in the Netherlands. I grew up in the Netherlands with a Brazilian mother who told me about my roots in Brazil in the Brazilian Amazon, where my grandfather used to have a rubber plantation. So she would use to tell me these stories about this flourishing industry and all these big houses in very remote areas of the jungle. These have all vanished in the meantime. So these houses and this industry no longer exist in that area. Nature has taken over, which is maybe a good thing, but the understanding of the value that forests have to offer has disappeared a little bit. So that value is not only invisible sometimes for people in Europe, but also for people locally who've all moved to the cities and sometimes still have deeds to these lands somewhere in a drawer, but are not really attached to those forests that much anymore. So I wanted to work on showing this value, demonstrating this value and demonstrating monetary value also of forests and see, look for ways to attract financing for these forests and its products and services that it has to offer. So I became an environmental economist and I liked the opportunities of finance mechanisms, but our economic system is quite conventional and it moves quite slowly and it has a couple of flaws and troubles. A few years ago I learned about blockchain technology and through my research I came to understand that blockchain can actually transform some of these fundamental problems that we are having in our conventional economic system. So it has some characteristics and aspects that could be applied in nature conservation and in economics in general. The basis of economics is trust. Before anyone can engage in a transaction they need to trust the other party. However in reality trust is almost never really present. People may not know each other and the lack of trust may hamper a transaction and that is why we started to rely on external truth tellers. So truth tellers are organizations and people within organizations that can help us with trust for a transaction. So these can be organizations that can verify that a person has specific knowledge or they have financial capabilities to pay for something or they are the person that they say that they are. And we also have organizations that can provide evidence of craftsmanship or capabilities like a diploma or other forms of attestation. This now has turned into us trusting these organizations, these centralized organizations which have also grown tremendously. They are bigger and more centralized and we find that in uncertain time with enough pressure it is possible for these people working in these organizations to become susceptible to coercion, corruption or censorship because we are all people and people have flaws of course. The most interesting thing about blockchain technology is that it is a new form of a governance mechanism. It allows for these transactions that I just mentioned but without these requirements of trust. If a person can provide trust by working in a centralized organization and looking up a document or a data in a database or in an archive this is also possible for a network of nodes and nodes are basically computers anywhere over the world and people with computers that can join this network. So blockchain is compiled of a network of nodes, people all over the world joining this network. The difference is that a network is not susceptible to coercion, corruption or censorship and that is why we refer to blockchain technology as trust minimized governance mechanism. So it is useful to consider governance problems in economics or in nature conservation. So major governance problems in forestry are for example related to registration of land, illegal deforestation, corruption but also threats and dangers that are connected to people who want to take action in tackling illegal deforestation. It is not always too difficult to bribe a person who works within land registration as some countries may have over three and a half thousand people working within these land registration databases. So it is not impossible to imagine finding one person within those thousands to bribe maybe. If such land register would be open for everyone to see where anyone can verify the validity of the ownership of land independently we have a much more robust and transparent system in land registration. Environmentalism in itself has become extremely dangerous for people involved. I see it myself in Brazil now when we visit our lands we have to go with a whole boat with military presence which is very different from 10 years ago. Within the last decade over 1700 environmentalists of people involved in environmentalism have been killed. So a more safe and anonymous network could help support local communities that can act as local forest ambassadors without putting them at risk. So we have verifiable reliable data from the ground but we can access it in a way that is safe and anonymous for them to provide. So this improves the privacy and our safety of course. Blockchain technology can in addition to this also provide mechanisms to reward these people for their efforts. So there's incentive now to provide information but there's also it is also more reliable and safer to do so for local communities. These incentive mechanisms they may rely on programmable money so cryptocurrency for example. Currently when an individual for instance in Europe transfers money to an NGO who vows to work on sustainable forest management or forest restoration or forest conservation this person financing this is not cannot always be sure that this money will actually be spent on these promises that are being made by these organizations. So blockchain can then be used to create more transparent chains. When it is possible to program money we can actually achieve upfront compliance so nowadays when we have a transaction afterwards we can check with an auditor with a controller whether this money has actually been spent the way we said it would be but with upfront compliance you can be insured before the transaction takes place that it will actually be spent only on that goal which is radically different. This is called a smart contract a smart contract is a self-executed agreement between parties. When with these contracts it is possible to create requirements and only when these requirements are met in agreement with those parties then the transaction will go through. This is not only useful in chains regarding forest preservation and protection but also when reconsidering the flaws of current current carbon offset mechanisms for instance this could open the carbon offset market drastically it could have many implications for for the trading of carbon. Two characteristics are often mentioned when we're talking about blockchain this is immutability and it is unstoppable and it's very interesting because people all over the world if you if you have a computer it's basically possible for you to enter this this network and and join and provide your data. It is borderless so this makes it very free from coercion censorship and corruption and a really interesting form of trust minimized governance. The future of sustainable forest management may be a combination of all of those things blockchain may be very different in 10 years from now we may know different solutions so it could be a combination of of different elements that I just mentioned. What is interesting about all these opportunities of blockchain is when you combine them you can think of a forest as an organization so if it is possible for a brand like apple to become an organization a legal entity that can take decisions that can have a bank account then why not apply this for a forest why could a forest not be an organization with a bank account if a forest would have a bank account and could take decisions for its own sake then it is possible for a forest to start expanding itself. Well this sounds super futuristic I realize that but people all over the world have actually started doing this they have started to think about ways and implementing ways to give bank accounts to forests and to make it possible to understand forest better and to make it possible to take decisions for forest in an automated way. What's also happening all over the world is that we are thinking about natural resources as legal entities there's a forest for instance in New Zealand that does it own governance it owns itself and can take its own decisions so these developments are actually in progress and if you are interested to hear more about what's going on in the world what these different initiatives are then we fully welcome you to this afternoon to hear more about it or to watch back these sessions and become engaged we have a chat room where you can be involved in discussions you can read these papers or you can meet with the with the speakers so we would definitely love to have you there because forest cannot program themselves and algorithms and code does also not program itself so we fully rely on professionals like IT developers but also designers philosophers forest specialists to bring together all this knowledge and come to sort of the consensus of what would work in that regard so please join us because there's so much work to be done in this field thank you thank you very much Jacqueline what an inspirational way to end a great session I am I know we have a session coming up straight after us but um can I invite any burning questions from the floor um from what you've heard today you've heard a lot and I hope you've also become convinced that in fact foresters are amongst the most innovative people around we've we've we've shown you so many amazing innovations that have been applied by countries and the final presentation I think showed us what could be happening in the next 10 to 20 years but I would welcome any questions from the floor all quiet so I mean yeah exactly I we've seen I think today how the latest digital innovations from from FAO from our partners from the countries are really helping countries achieve their forest goals I mean that is our that is our endpoint we don't play around with digital tools for fun although it is a lot of fun we want to enable people to do to do what they need to do if it's restoration if it's reducing deforestation and degradation if it's doing sustainable forest management and I think today we've seen we've seen evidence of that we we've seen that it's happening I mean I found the presentation from Indonesia really inspiring the fact that they as their capabilities for forest monitoring improved they were able to act and reduce their deforestation and now they have this ambitious FOLU 2030 plan that is reducing deforestation and restoring on a massive scale and underpinned by data and digital innovation so I hope you leave this session as inspired as I am and I would like to warmly thank our panelists for joining us today and thank you all for coming I realize we are in parallel to ongoing cofo discussions but thank you all and wishing you all all a great continuation of your day thank you