 at zero of the United Kingdom will join us virtually. Actually, we'll have a video speech for this event. And Ms. Rebecca Moore, the director of the Google Earth Engine, is on her way to this meeting room and distinguished participants in person and online. Ladies and gentlemen, a very warm welcome to all of you for this hybrid event to celebrate International Day of Forest 2024. So the theme for IDF-24 is forest and innovation, new solutions for a better world. So the theme was chosen to highlight how the joint efforts to address global forest challenges require innovative solutions. So I used to say that with 100 million hectares lost annually to deforestation, 35 million damage by in-set pests and diseases, and up to approximately 70 million hectares, say, burned by wildfires, new and innovative solutions are essential. So the role of innovation is well-recognized by FAO forestry in its new roadmap, from vision to action 2431. The forestry roadmap, which will be launched during Coho 27 in July, outlines a new area of conservation, restoration, sustainable production while leaving no one behind. I'm delighted that we are joined virtually by the minister of energy security and net zero from the United Kingdom, the right honorable Graham Stewart. The UK is actually a very important collaborator, partner of FAO, especially in the field of forestry, particularly with respect to the new program, accelerating innovative monitoring for forests. So it's now under the leadership of Julian Fox, and it is called M4 Forest. So this five-year program is closely aligned to today's theme, and I'm sure that we'll hear more about it during the discussions. So today, we are in the midst of a forest data revolution driven by innovation and technology. FAO forestry has been a proud pioneer in this space. By developing the Open Forest Initiative, it is the first open source project at FAO. Over 200,000 people from 196 countries have been helped to improve their forest data. Open Forest is now used by 90% of the forest emissions to UNFCCC. I think it's 90% out of 63 countries are using this FAO Open Forest data platform. And the improved forest data is resulting in positive actions on the ground. Much of this technological innovation has evolved through partnership, such as that with Google. So I'm also delighted that Rebecca Moore, the director of Google Earth Engine, is with us today. And in signing a new MOU between Google Engine and FAO, we are scaling up our partnership and cementing it for years to come, as well as strive to meet the SDGs. We reach a further milestone today in the launch of a new next generation mobile application under the Open Forest banner called Ground, which has been jointly developed over the past two years by FAO and Google. This app has been specifically designed to empower indigenous peoples, small holders, and local communities in the actions on the ground. So colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, as we acknowledge our progress and benefits of this data revolution, we must also recognize how much work we still have to do. There is a need to scale up innovation to hold deforestation and catalyze progress under the UN decade for ecosystem restoration. We must develop early warning systems for fires and also continue to empower indigenous peoples as forest custodians. Enhancing the role of wood and forest products is also very key. So by increasing the development of materials derived from forest and trees, we can substitute plastics, building materials, fabrics, medicines, and many other everyday items with sustainable forest products. And FAO is steadfast in this support. Innovation is at the heart of this support to develop new solutions for a better world. So I hope you engage fully in these sessions, which in turn will produce concrete results towards our shared goals. Thank you. Over to you, Jordan. Thank you very much, Jimin, for those really inspiring and encouraging words. We now have a video message from the right Honorable Graham Stewart, the Minister for Energy Security and Net Zero from the United Kingdom. Thank you. Hello, and happy International Day of Forests. I'm sorry I can't be with you in person, but I still wanted to send this message. As the UK's Minister for Energy Security and Net Zero, I'm determined the UK continues its support for the protection of forests. At COP28, I was pleased to see how prominent forests were in the negotiations, as indeed they should be. And earlier this month, I attended the Forest Agriculture and Commodities Trade Forum in Bali. As co-chair of the discussions, I heard from delegates about the changes they're making to ensure the production of commodities, like palm oil and chocolate, doesn't come at the expense of forests. In fact, I didn't just hear about it. I saw it with my own eyes. I was able to visit the Wanagiri Forest, where they produced sustainable coffee. And I was particularly impressed by their Tree Adopter Program, which protects the forest while adding to the local economy. And I'm pleased to say I'm now the very proud sponsor of an adopted tree. To me, it's a reminder that stopping deforestation requires global coordination, just as you're doing today. But smaller actions, one tree at a time, can also make a real difference for local communities. Our forests are a legacy of our past, but also a key to our future, because there's no pathway to the 1.5 degree Paris target without urgently halting global deforestation. Now that's why the UK has provided 24.5 million pounds to establish aim for forests. And we're proud to work with UNFAO and other organizations on the program. Since its launch, one year ago, Aim for Forests is already supporting 11 countries. And by harnessing our world-leading universities and research organizations to deliver tools and data that can help protect forests. We've got in-person workshops and certified e-learning courses, which have already reached more than 1,200 people. And about 40% of those attendees were women, and more than 100 were from indigenous peoples or members of local communities to the forest concerned. And today, I'm delighted to announce that we're committing a further 6 million pounds for the Zambia Integrated Forest Landscape Program. This funding will help them to expand climate-smart agriculture practices so they can tackle drivers of deforestation. The UK is proud to share its innovative technology and provide climate finance to projects that need it, so that together we can end deforestation. And I'm certain that today, your discussions will help us reach this important goal. Thank you. Many thanks to the minister for the encouraging words and to the UK for the continuous support. We would now like to launch the International Day of Forests video if we can play the video, please. Thank you. Forests are one of the planet's greatest resources. But climate change and human impact pose growing threats. Thanks to cutting-edge advances in technology, new tools are making it possible to address these challenges. One of the front lines for forest innovation is here in Papua New Guinea, which is home to the world's third largest rainforest and 7% of global biodiversity. In this Pacific Island nation, 97% of the land is under customary ownership. This means it belongs to the people. Papua New Guinea's indigenous peoples are now using advanced technology to monitor their forests. We are in the midst of a forest data revolution, and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations is at the forefront of this. Here in Papua New Guinea, we are supporting the government and local government to help the people of Papua New Guinea. Papua New Guinea's indigenous peoples are now using advanced technology to monitor their forests. We are in the midst of a forest data revolution, to help local communities to collect new data, to boost their efforts to protect, restore and sustainably use forests. Elsewhere, remote sensing and monitoring is also helping to fight fires, one of the main threats to forests, by creating early warning systems and reducing fire risk. But innovation is not just changing the way we monitor forests. Innovation is also pushing the boundaries of what we can do with wood and forest products. In 2030, we will have to house an additional 3 billion people. But the construction sector alone is responsible for approximately 37% of energy and process-related greenhouse gas emissions. We do need to try and find a better way to build housing, and this is where Mastimba comes into play. It reduces the carbon footprint of buildings and it stores carbon for its lifetime. And this can make wood-based construction almost an extension of our forests. And the list of new applications is constantly growing, from packaging to cosmetics. State-of-the-art wood-based products are also being used in medicine. For example, in casts, biodegradable medical equipment and even antimicrobial creams. And they are also starting to increase sustainability in the clothing and fashion industry, with around 60% of all textiles currently estimated to be plastic-based. People really want to know what their clothes are made of and choose better, more responsible options. I think using wood-based materials could be a game changer. I can see so many possibilities that these kind of materials can bring to the fashion industry. And it's super exciting to be part of it. From new ways to monitor and protect our forests, to breakthroughs paving the way for greater sustainability, forest innovations are set to play a key role in tackling global challenges for our planet. Thank you very much. That was amazing. We're actually just... Rebecca Moore is walking here from our hotel and we're monitoring it, but she should walk in any second. So I will... And she's on the way, perfect timing. So maybe we'll just pause for one minute while Rebecca approaches the room, an eagerly awaited moment and nothing like keeping a suspense full. I'll put it on a day like today. And here she is. Rebecca Moore. It is now with great pleasure that I introduce Rebecca Moore, the founder and director of Google Earth Outreach and Google Earth Engine. Rebecca, please come straight to the podium. Rebecca will provide remarks and help us launch a new addition to FAO's open forest family, open forest ground. Over to you, Rebecca. Fantastic, perfect entry. Hello, everyone. Hopefully worth waiting for. Perfect. Good afternoon, everyone. It's really a pleasure to be here. Representing Google and the Google Earth team. We have... Let me back up here, yes. We're gonna talk about turning pixels into knowledge and action through technology, innovation and partnerships. And yes, our formal partnership began with FAO in 2010 when we made the first visit and began having our staff meet with FAO staff. And then we developed conviction that there was definitely a very strong partnership to be held between Google and FAO. FAO with working directly with all the countries, driving impact on the ground and Google providing technology innovation. And so I was actually here in 2016 when we presented the partnership. And at that time we had a conundrum. FAO and Google, should we call it GAU or should we call it FOOGLE? And we never made a decision on that. But the good news is the more material important things manifested in terms of a lot of progress together. And we're gonna speak about that a little bit of historical and then looking forward. So this is not a news flash for people, but we do face an urgent crisis. The force of the world and much of the planet is changing dramatically in ways that are observable from space. We're hitting these planetary tipping points where former healthy carbon sinks are becoming carbon sources like parts of the Amazon. And the good news is there is now a tremendous amount of public open free, near real time, high resolution, optical radar, all kinds of incredible data that is available to help us understand what's happening, create transparency and drive action, turning pixels into actionable information. But it was very, very difficult for any normal institution to do that given the scale of the data. So that motivated us as Google to employ the power of the Google Cloud. And we built a platform called Google Earth Engine that we announced at COP16. And it brings together, it was the first cloud native planetary scale geospatial analytics platform with data catalog updating every 15 minutes co-located with massive computational resources and a really growing thriving ecosystem of users. So again, the innovation was connecting all of this data coming in, hosting it with an analysis ready form with processor capability. And again, many of you are probably very familiar with this, but the first, when we first launched Earth Engine, there was kind of a skepticism, like what is this Google thing and why do we think it should work? And I have to credit Matt Hansen, University of Maryland who kicked the tires a little bit and he was like, okay, let's give it a try to do the first Landsat scale, i.e., high resolution map of force cover and change. That came out in 2013. It was a million hours of computation, but because we ran it on 10,000 computers in parallel, we had the result in a few days as opposed to 15 years, which is what it would have taken on a single computer. So then people began to go, okay, maybe there's something here with this cloud-powered remote sensing. The tremendous partnership with WRI on Global Forest Watch, these near-real-time alerts, also powered by Matt Hansen's lab, are publishing live in Forest Watch for action to be taken. They have done some really good work recently around documenting and providing evidence of the impact of Forest Watch. And there's been a lot of uptake by indigenous communities with a lot of successes in reducing deforestation. So Earth Engine really has emerged as a very powerful platform for sustainability, both science and operational decision-making, tools like Global Forest Watch, the projects with UNFAO that we're gonna talk about, and then private sector using it as a tool to meet their commitments around sustainable supply chain. So we'll talk about that a bit more. Here's an example of a fantastic application built by FAO in the days when we were still trying to figure out if it was Gao or Fugl, but meanwhile, people like Eric Lindquist and Anci and folks went to work and they created this fantastic tool called CIPL that is helping countries understand, monitor, measure their forests and provide documentation for UN Red or Red Plus support. And this is just like one image, again powered by Earth Engine that I find interesting because it's using the power of Earth Engine to look at the pattern of a pixel when deforestation happens over time or when degradation happens, so that's for the nerds. So, but backing away from nerds to Eric, to what this is all about at the end of the day, we've been really excited to see and this is new information that has not, we have not talked about publicly until today and only because through the deep partnership with FAO, there's extensive documentation evidence of this point that a number of countries, going back over the past 10 years or so, have used Earth Engine and the FAO tools powered by Earth Engine to avoid almost 100 megatons of forest related carbon, 95 megatons. And if anyone wants to know the gory details on that number, which I'm sure some of you will, we have a blog post coming out today that speaks more about that. Restoration of course is critical alongside avoiding deforestation. I know Tom Crowther is here and I'm excited about the panel. He's gonna be leading his team used Earth Engine to do the first high resolution study of suitability for restoration, looking at every hectare on the planet, those published in Science and then updated recently in Nature, confirming their findings. And again, I don't wanna say too much more about it because he's here and he can speak more authoritatively, but what we've been excited to see is the first powering the science and then powering an operational application that's being used by more than 100,000 projects around the ground to plan and execute, implement restoration projects. I think it is the biggest, most successful platform right now for restoration. And they're measuring all kinds of co-benefits of that such as carbon emission reduction. All right, the last area is, all right, we all care about forests here in this room. If you wanna understand what's happening to forests, you have to understand the drivers of deforestation which often relate to conversion of forests for agriculture or I've learned recently aquaculture, mangroves being converted for aquaculture. And so you really have to have a holistic understanding of these other land use areas and how they're changing. And especially in the context of something like EUDR and sustainable supply chain commitments that are being made. So Unilever is one of our partners, our customers on Earth Engine and they're doing really interesting stuff with modeling the sort of mill catchment area of for oil palm in Indonesia. But again, they like many other private sector and NGO, they needed better data to really execute on these commitments. So I'm super excited. Some of you may have heard about this. The forest data partnership which was initially, I think conceived by USAID and they somehow wrangled a bunch of us to across sectors to come together and attempt to address the gaps in knowledge and data that exist. This was predating EUDR but that have created complexity for sustainable sourcing commitments and zero deforestation commitments to be met by companies. So we formed this, we're kind of the tech arm of it but you've got WRI, NASA Severe, Unilever, WRI. I mentioned WRI and of course FOW has been a very strong partner in this. And there's a little bit of eye chart here but the two main areas that forest data partnership and you're gonna hear more about this today that forest data partnership is focusing on is first like because we have essentially all the sectors represented among the membership and we do invite more members engaging and aligning with partners across these sectors to set up a governance structure to engage with the organizations that need this information and may also participate in supplying information and then deploying the data layers that we are producing. And then on the accelerating innovation side which is more where Google's leaning in, there are not good maps or masks of the seven EUDR regulated commodities such as palm, cocoa, rubber, coffee, and so on. They just don't exist. And so we are leaning in as Google on producing those using machine learning and AI but very much collaboratively with FOW and other members of the FDAP. We're doing this for the FDAP and we expect it to be an iterative process but the first model is already out which is palm and then we'll be doing the others. And then we have a field data collection tool that we're also gonna share today. So just zooming in, you'll see the first product of the forest data partnership which is, we're looking at South Sumatra, zooming in, here's, you can see imagery and here is our map of current version V1 map of palm, probability of palm in 2023 and then this is the probability of palm in 2020. This is all available now, launched for people to view, interact with and there's a, if you wanna get even more engaged there's a link for you to participate in terms of providing feedback, maybe providing data because we want this to be a community-led project. Everything's open, public open free. The last area, if they don't hook me off the stage is in going through this work over all these years together with FAL, we've learned a lot about what gaps are and we're filling those gaps and one of them is really that there hasn't been enough meaningful engagement and participation of local and indigenous communities who often are the experts on what's happening on their lands or adjacent lands but they haven't had the tooling and engagement to meaningfully participate in many cases and meanwhile NGOs and governments and private sector organizations also need ground-based data, field data to inform understanding what's happening, validate models and so on but they're just tremendous challenges around that. So today with FAL, we're announcing a new tool that will be part of the legendary I would say FAL open source suite called Open Forest that today has tools like Collector Earth. This will join that as an open source tool called Ground. Our goal is to democratize mapping and field data collection at scale. There's a link there if you wanna learn more about it but just imagine that it's a native Android app with a web-based side for dispatching and organizing the tasks that will happen in the field. It contains very good resolution imagery globally that has come from Google Earth and in some cases produced by Earth Engine. You can run in offline mode and then there are various tools for drawing, annotating, capturing information and so on. And I think you're gonna learn more about it today but one of our real goals is to enable smallholder farmers and communities to be able to collect information, submit it easily to engage with cloud computation, creation of derivative information and connecting them to markets in a meaningful way. This is some field trials that have gone on with Ground. So with that kind of whirlwind tour I did wanna say that we really as Google tremendously value the partnership with Fowl. I feel that it brings together very complimentary strengths that is creating benefit for countries, communities, people around the world. So thank you. We have a special thing happening now. Thank you. Thank you so much, Rebecca. That was worth the wait. Although I did have five heart attacks while I was there. Wait for you. So yeah, we have a very special moment. In fact, we are signing into implementation a new memorandum of understanding between FAO and Google. It will run for the next four years and marks a significant scaling up of our collaboration to accelerate technical innovation for the implementation of FAO strategic framework and the agenda of the sustainable development goals. So I have a beautiful document here and a beautiful pen and it'll be a great opportunity that Jimin and Rebecca will sign the MOU. One moment for a great start and now thank you so much, Rebecca. Thank you, Jimin. Now we'll move to the technical part and this is the bit I'm really excited about. I'll invite the first panel, please join me on the stage. I'll introduce Dilneef, who's our moderator. To talk about the incredible impact we've seen in terms of innovation and technology in enabling forest-based reporting and climate action. Over to you, Til, please. We'll just wait a moment while the Til, while the over to you, Til, please go for it. Thank you very much, Julian. Thank you very much, Julian. And as Julian already said, we are here to set out to prove that foresters are really innovative bunch. That's what he said, I think, in order to introduce the whole day and you will see that the whole afternoon consists of a series of sessions on innovation and forests, especially innovation and forest monitoring and this specifically is the session on innovation and forest monitoring and international reporting of countries, which is really one of the big topics for much of our work here at FAO. And well, it's not something that happened and started yesterday. International reporting has been around since around the 1940s, 1950s and it started here. Here at FAO with the Global Forest Resource Assessments. It started, I think, in 1948, although I'm sure there's people in this room that can say that more precise than I could. And it's still around, it's still happening. Now then international reporting really took more center stage and got reloaded with the Rio Conventions in the 1990s. And now there's a number of streams really with countries reporting internationally. We will be speaking about this. We will be speaking about the technical innovation that make that possible and that contribute to enhancing the accuracy and the reliability and the robustness of the data in this. Now, we have a panel discussion about this and I'll introduce the panel in a minute but we get started with a keynote presentation. With a keynote presentation by Marika Sankar. And Marika, you please deliver your keynote and then afterwards I will introduce the panel and then we will have a very good discussion. Marika, please, over to you. Oh yeah, I should introduce Marika properly, of course. Marika is, well, maybe yourself introduce Marika. Would that be okay? Sure, I can do that. Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Marika Sankar and I'm coordinating the support on measuring, reporting and verification in FAO. Okay, I have a presentation. This is how I'm going to start, thank you. All right, so the keynote that I'm presenting here today, it's building on the publication that we are launching today, which is titled Technical Innovation, Driving Transparent Forest Monitoring and Reporting for Climate Action. So let's first have a look at forests and their role in the global carbon cycle. So every year we humans emit about 41 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere and around 11% of this is from land usage, it's mainly deforestation. On the other hand, about 33% of all the CO2 that we emit gets reabsorbed by the land sink and those are mainly forests. So as you can see here in this diagram, the two central fluxes are strongly forest related. But if you look at the range around these estimates provided in brackets, you can see these are the two most uncertain fluxes. So we need better forest monitoring to get more accurate estimates and to improve our understanding of forests and climate change mitigation. So in 2014, countries were invited to submit a reference level to the UNFCC. So a reference level is a benchmark for assessing each country's performance in reducing emissions from deforestation, forest degradation and enhancing forest-based removals. So since 2014, 63 countries have submitted 93 reference level reports. So as you can see, several countries have reported more reports over the years. So that could be for several reasons. Either enhance the scope, additional activities or enhance the geographical coverage or to improve the methodology. So in the back of this graph, you can see the forest area cumulatively covered by these reference levels. So in 2014, we had 0.2 billion hectares of forest covered by reference levels. And mind you, some of these countries had subnational reference levels. So over the time now, 10 years later, we have 1.6 billion hectares of reference levels covering forest covered by a reference level. And that is slightly over 70% of the forest cover in developing countries. So after submitting a reference level, countries can submit subsequently emission reductions in their BUR technical annex or now biannual transparency report technical annex. And 22 countries have done this to date. So cumulatively, these countries have reduced 14 billion tons of CO2 equivalent between 2006 and 2022. Now if we look at this timeline, we do seem to see a little bit of a stagnation with no results submitted in 2023, for example. Now that could be for multiple reasons. One of the reasons could be the lack of climate finance for UNFCCC submitted emission reductions. So since 2020, there has not been any finance available under the Green Climate Fund for red plus emission reductions. And there still is not no clarity yet on the future. So let's look a little bit beyond the UNFCCC. And then we can see that countries actually have quite actively reported emission reductions elsewhere. So we have the FCPF Carbon Fund, which is a pilot program for red plus results-based payments and arts trees for a carbon standard for jurisdictional red plus. So these carbon standards can give countries potentially access to carbon markets. But they have MRV requirements that go beyond the UNFCCC reporting modalities. So technical innovation can help countries meet these requirements. So what innovations are we then talking about? So first of all, there's improved imagery. So over the years, there's new satellites that have been launched, which provide imagery of higher temporal and spatial resolution. There are new global tree cover products and improved algorithms. So now we have dense time series algorithms that can filter out seasonalities and get more accurate estimates of forest and forest changes. And Rebecca already showed it this morning. There's the global forest change product. For example, here you see a little screenshot with estimates of spatial data on tree cover and tree cover loss. We also have improved methodologies. So the science around area estimation is greatly improved. So there are several publications that provide good practice for countries in doing their area estimations and providing them ways of correcting maps for classification errors. And finally, there are several open source solutions. So platforms and tools that can help countries access and analyze spatial data, such as open forest. And these often used cloud computing. So they're really helping countries to overcome internet barriers or limited computing capacity on the local computers. And these open source solutions basically help countries implement any of the earlier mentioned innovations. All right, let's have a closer look at the imagery used over time. So if we look at this graph, the very first striking thing is that there's not a single reference level submission that did not use Landsat imagery. So that really underscores the importance of this source of imagery. But what we also see is the increasing use of Sentinel and Planet imagery. So now why is that important? So Landsat has a resolution of 30 meters. Sentinel brings this down to 10 to 20 and Planet even further to three to five meters. So we simply can see much more, which is especially important for assessing, for example, emissions from degradation. Now let's have a look at a few other numbers. So 56% of the countries make use of the global forest change product must be said that no country uses it off-shelf. So they use it as part of their national analysis, an interim step, or as part of the quality control. 75% of countries use sample-based area estimation. So implementing these good practice suggestions from the remote sensing science. Then 89% of countries use at least one or several of the open forest solutions. So the solutions that help them access and analyze spatial data. And 54% of countries report overall uncertainty around their forest-related emission estimates. Now on the right-hand side here in this slide, you can also see the situation as it was six years ago. So what's particularly striking is the increase in sample-based area estimation, which went from 46 to 75%, and the increase in overall uncertainty reporting going from 37 to 54%. So in conclusion, we can see a lot of progress that's been made by countries, and countries really took advantage of technical innovations to improve their estimates. So we need this better monitoring for enhanced transparency and to understand the role of forests in climate change mitigation. But beyond this, enhanced transparency also builds trust. And trust is needed if we want more investments in forest-related emission reductions. So these technologies actually can help countries give access to climate finance. Now many of the nationally determined contributions by countries have forest-related targets, but many of these are conditional to international finance. So if we want to really help forest, meet the Paris Agreement goals, countries should really be able to unlock this finance and realize their NDC targets. Thank you. Thank you, Marieke. Thank you, Marieke. Thank you so much. I think that presentation should really go a long way towards explaining what we mean by international reporting and what we mean by technological innovation and international reporting. And you will have later the opportunity to ask questions. We do that at the end of the session. So please do take note, shop in your pencils and do take note of any questions that you may have from Marieke later or really for any of the panelists. But what we do before is we do a panel discussion and I have a set of pre-prepared questions for our panelists. What I'd like to do is I'd like to please bring up the two panelists who are connected online also. Please bring them up on the video screen. If you can. And then I'd like to introduce who we have here to discuss what Marieke's presentation and otherwise. Mr. Video Man, I hope you can hear me, that you please bring up the two panelists who are connected remotely on the video screen. Mr. Video Man. There we have Rosalind. And then we should also have Fiona connected. Is there any way to show them both on the screen or one up? All right, while you work on that, maybe I'll start with the introduction over here. Yes, perfect. This is what I wanted, excellent. So we have a very strong panel here that we'll discuss about the question of technological innovation and international reporting. We have to my left, Luisa Teixeira, who is with Planet Labs, a leading provider of geospatial imagery. And she will say a few words about what she is doing. And we have of course Marieke, who is one of the leading specialists internationally and really on international reporting and also one of my favorite colleagues in the team. Then we have, of course, Dan Urban, who is with NASA and with the severe program. And we will be very curious to hear from him also. And then we have joining us online from Accra. We have Rosalind Ajay, who is with the Ghana Forestry Commission and really the champion of much what is climate change and mitigation strategies through forests in that country. Really curious to hear some of her words. And then we have Fiona Stringer. Fiona Stringer with the International Forest Unit of the UK. She's in the Department of Energy Security in net zero and we have heard from her minister before, but she's one of the persons that we very closely work together with in that department. Right, yeah, so we will start out with a round of questions that I have pre-prepaid. And then later, there will also be opportunities for questions from the audience. Okay, so we start out please with Fiona. With Fiona, that's okay. Fiona, have you done a sound check? I hope that the sound check works okay for you. But yes, look Fiona, we have heard so much now from Marike about country progress and all these reports. There's what is it, 65 countries or so? 63 countries that's a bit of a debate in reporting to the UNFCCC and there's like 90 something reports that have been, it is impressive, but Fiona, why does that matter? Why does it matter? Why is this progress and transparency and data quality really important? Please talk to us about why donors like the United Kingdom invest into this thing. Fiona, please, over to you. Thanks, Till. Thanks for having me today. Hopefully you can all see and hear me. The sound check hasn't really worked. Do you want me to try again? No, it's better, try again. Okay, can you hear me now? Perfect, please go, please go. So thanks for having me and yeah, a very happy International Day of Forest to all those celebrating. Thanks for the really interesting question. I think the most important points to raise here are around evidence and the evidence that data and transparency can provide and also the benefits that increased reliability that enhancements in both can create. So on evidence, you know, it really gives us the information needed to tell the story on why forests and land are so important for the world and for tackling climate change and it provides information on how the forests are being managed, how policies and practices can be implemented and adapted where needed. And providing this in an open source and transparent approach means that we can really demonstrate that reliability and the replicability of data reporting and support countries to be able to effectively report and contribute to that international climate and nature commitments. I think for us, it's really critical to understand where climate finance is most needed to have this high quality data and the usability of that high quality data to see where adds most value. I think for us in the UK and for many others, investment in robust methods and innovation to generate high quality data and short transparency also really provides a pathway to catalyze much larger opportunities for forest countries, including accessing results-based payments and potential forest carbon market opportunities. And we can really see that through the figures that Marie Kaye mentions with increased reporting to these reputable forest carbon standards. I think for us, we really want to build confidence as well in the actions that are being undertaken in order to kind of propel these much larger opportunities forward. I think enhanced transparency and reporting kind of really builds that investor confidence, not only in the integrity of Red Plus and forest carbon, but also thinking beyond that, for example, relating to forest risk quantities and kind of building assurances that those products are indeed being sustainably produced. I think it's why the UK offers such a range of avenues to accelerate transparency and data quality, including the Aim for Forest programme, which we're really excited to be working with FAO on, but also through kind of our other World Bank Red Plus initiatives, through the Red Early Movers programme, through UK PACT, as well as work under the FACT dialogue, which our minister mentioned earlier as well. So really I think, yeah, technical innovation, advancements in data are really the backbone for countries to understand and use their data to kind of provide broader international assurances on that data and to gain the much needed access to finance both climate and carbon. Thanks. Thank you, Fiona. Thank you, Fiona. All right, so a few words that come up here is international assurances. Trust, Merica used that word, no? Data quality, Fiona spoke about that. It's here, what planet labs? Let's hear from Louisa. Donut, the majority has come up a number of times already. I haven't taken account, you probably have. So what are you trying to do? Well, why is planet labs important? And what is it that you can do with a planet imagery that you cannot do with a more traditional data set, land-send imagery and whatnot? So thank you, and thank you for the invitation to be here today and to share a little bit from our side. I think that, well, for the people that know the satellite images and the kind of constellations that we're talking about today, I think what kind of really comes up immediately is the high frequency of data that planets can provide. So typically image all the landmass of the world almost every day, which is quite a lot more frequently than Landsat, a bit more than Sentinel that Maike also mentioned in the report. But in fact, we tend to see and tend to even work from planet side looking into how the data can be used in all together. So these data are not necessarily competing with each other, but they really complement each other in terms of different needs and temporal stacks. I think another advantage of planet data or a unique value, let's call it, it could be the higher resolution that we offer. It's higher than both planets, sorry, Landsat and Sentinel. But of course, it's also a commercial data set. So it does offer as well, poses a bit of problems in terms of access or maybe obstacles. But those can be, of course, worked around and we've seen that a lot of the countries are able to use planet status through different avenues of access that are done in cooperation with different organizations, including with FAO. Thank you, Luisa. More frequent, higher resolution. That's a few strong arguments for using that data set, surely is. But let's hear from Rosalind then. Rosalind works, of course, in a forest country. Works, of course, in a forest country. And in Rosalind, see, then there's all this talk about higher data quality and more sophisticated methods. You hear uncertainty analysis, sample-based areas, estimation, all these novel innovative, all of that sounds great. But then, from the perspective of the forest country, that means that you would have to have a team that actually works on these things and constantly follows all these technical innovations and builds them into Organa's forest reporting in that case. Please talk to us about how you manage that process. How do you manage that process with necessarily limited resources? Rosalind, over to you, please. Thank you very much, too. And a very good afternoon for my crowd, Organa. I hope I can be heard very well. And happy, thank you. Happy International Day of Forests to everyone gathered in the room and also connected here and hearing us or seeing us. And thank you for having Organa on this panel. So sorry, I couldn't be in room physically, but I hope to be soon because I was really looking forward to this. So Till, you asked a very important question. But for a forest country, even though we have these complexities, the ultimate question for us is what sort of accuracy can we have in the processes or in the methods that we are deploying? What sort of levels of uncertainty can we have in those methods as well? And I had, I think, Marike talked about transparency, which is very important because our forest landscapes are very diverse. They are quite dense as well. For a country like Ghana, our forest landscapes are mosaic. We have different tree crops intertwined with the economical forest crops and also the trees. And so that makes it quite a very dense landscape. And of course, we have our local communities also who depend on these forest resources. And of course, the macroeconomy, that also depends on it. Because for example, I mentioned Koko and others, which are really the backbone of the country. And of course, then also being an agrarian country means that we also have agricultural landscapes in these same forest landscapes. So to have methods or to be able to generate data that helps us reduce uncertainty, that gives us more accuracy. And ultimately, enhances our transparency across the different stakeholders, primary sector, local communities, governments here, social issues, is very important to us. And that comes at a cost and that comes with a total of things to do. However, during the readiness phase of Ghana, so Marike mentioned when she was talking in the FCPS sites, you see that Ghana was significantly in there also in the submission. So UNFCCC were in there. We have been working at this since 2008 through the FCPS process with the World Bank. And in that process, we decided to establish thematic working groups. So we have a thematic working group for safeguards. We have one for consultation and participation. We have for demonstration of red glass interventions. We have for policy conversations. And we have for measurements, reporting and verification. And that is more contextualized for this particular question that you have asked. Now that group has been very useful in helping us walk through the different phases of the evolving methods and also being able to develop the right datasets and even identifying what sort of datasets we are going to use. It is a multi stakeholder group not just made up of people from government but we have research and academia in there. And then of course, we also have representatives from other private entities who are not necessarily within the space of either government or research and academia. And we also have representation from INGS and CSOs. Now that group has been very solid helping us with the technical expertise that matches up also to give the right feedback to the political leadership that we have on the best methods and approaches for the kind of landscape that we have. When we started working with the FCPF we were using wall-to-wall maps. We realized that the accuracy of our maps were a challenge. And then together with our stakeholders in Ghana through different consultations and with the support of the World Bank, Ghana identified that. We can have the effort coming to help us to use a different methodology, the sample-based methodology. And here, let me give huge shout-outs to Mareke and her team till you mentioned that Mareke is your favorite. She can't be more of your favorite than she is for me. Mareke is amazing. She's a superstar for me. In Ghana, we heal her all the time. She came in with her team, Remy. I can't remember all the names but they were phenomenal in taking us through all the different stages of using this new approach. Having the needed stakeholder consultations, understanding the pros and cons of this approach over, developing the conventional maps that we have always battled with. And through that particular process we have been able to relieve the pressure. But of course, there have been also significant aspect that until now as a country we do not have the full scope to undertake on our own. And so we have benefited from a lot of hand-holding. Remy still gives us pressure because we keep asking ourselves what if we don't have the support of the FAO again? To what extent have we built that capacity? And one that I really want to mention is on the Monte Carlo analysis for uncertainty assessments. It becomes very difficult and challenging for us. Sometimes we have to wait for a very long period so that we have the right expert supporters from the FAO. And so going forward to relieve some of these pressures we believe that we would have to come up with a personnel who can be trained eventually to do some of these assessments or to undertake some of these interventions for us when we no longer have that dedicated support. But I hope that within for forest coming on board we can still have the support of the FAO for some time because we are then moving into a bigger picture of forest monitoring systems and how we can have systems in place that are giving us near real-time or real-time data and not just working on a public basis to produce resource-based payments according to reporting cycles on the air pass that we have signed. So these are some of the things that we have gone through in our journey and we have largely benefited from the technical support and capacity that our external stakeholders have given us and also our internal stakeholders through the working group that has been engaged in with the National Replacement Secretariat. Thank you. Thank you, Rosalind. Thank you, Rosalind. And Marike, it sounds like they do like you, Ngana. That's here a bit more from you. That's here a bit more from you. You already spoke to us about country reporting and how it has been developed, but let's place this into perspective a bit. Talk to us about, if you look back, if you look back and not only five years back, but let's look like 10 years back, 20 years back, 2004, 2014, where were countries at that time, country reporting internationally here? Thank you for that question, Till. So, yeah, it was a whole different situation, I must say, at that time. And maybe most relevant here to mention is this paper by Nesha and colleagues. So they looked at the capacities of forest countries reporting to the Global Forest Resources Assessment in 2005 and compared the capacities in 2020. And what they found is that the number of countries with high to very high capacities in remote sensing and national forest inventories basically doubled over that 15-year period. So we really see a massive shift in reporting. And the progress is actually most pronounced in tropical countries. So it's quite likely that a lot of this is explained by countries' aspirations to participate in Red Plus and to get access to climate finance through forest-based emission reductions. So Red Plus really pushed or really helped a lot in the capacity development and really helped to improve the quality of data from forest countries over time. Enormous progress then, no? Look, but this was really just to prepare the question for Dan that's coming now, which is, what do you think 10 years from now, looking into the future, not back, but 10 years from now, where are we gonna be then? And what do you see as the main engine of innovation? What do you think, what's in stock for us, Dan, please? Thanks, Till, and it's great to be here. Actually, before I go forward, I wanna look back as well, because I've been in the field satellite remote sensing for 30 years. And I see a lot of young people in the audience. 30 years ago, one Landsat scene, and even at NASA, we had to buy data. We had to, so we built the satellite, we launched the satellite, and then we had to buy our own data back. And that was at NASA, and a scene cost $2,500, and it was reduced to around $500. Per scene, 185 kilometers on the side, 30 meter resolution. And you could imagine, I mean, we'd complain at NASA to buy our own data back. You could imagine somebody, a student, or an NGO, or a country that needed that data, and it was almost impossible to get. And then things started changing. Of course, well, I mean, before, even in that time, just to process that one image, I remember on my 486 computer, I'd have to let it go overnight to do one process and hope that the power didn't blink and I didn't lose it or something went wrong and come back and I'd hope I'd get something in the morning. I was thinking about what Rebecca said and I think we still would, if we were doing that first analysis on that single computer, we'd still have four more years to go. So, and then things started changing. In 2008, the US government made Landsat data free and open. And there was a massive shift in the use of that data. People started using it, the return on investment, there was a study done by USGS, the return on investment was massive when the data became free and open. And then the Europeans followed suit with Sentinel which is extraordinary. So data started becoming available and then we started seeing and I was just blown away this morning to see the demos of all of the tools that we're seeing. So we went from data being really hard to get, running on single computers to now unbelievable tools like we heard about Ground or SIPL or WISP or Collect Earth Online or Google Earth Engine which is enabling us to process from that one scene overnight to an entire continent in seconds to capabilities like Carto that are really connecting so many dots. And so I think looking forward as we continue to look into the future, I think partnerships are more important than ever. We talked about the forest data partnership this morning bringing together so many unique partners. Really strange bedfellows effectively coming together to solve some of the world's biggest challenges and it really takes that creativity to do that. I lead the severe program which we've been around for 19 years and when we started it, it was NASA, a space agency. We travel into space, we look into the depths of space, we use the vantage point of space to look back on our home planet and partnering with USAID. Our foreign assistance development agency that works in 100 countries around the world and at first people are like, that's crazy but I think it's these really diverse partnerships that we see whether it be in my own program or forest data partnership or so many others that are really, that's really where the magic happens and I think it's that as we move forward and we look into 2034 and to the future I think what's so important is open data. I think that the planet data has been just a game changer and Nick Fee enabling that to become available to so many people around the world. I'd argue that that's probably one of the five most important data sets in the history of remote sensing. I won't name the other four, but I'll put it in the top five and it's just extraordinary and the fact that people around the world, I travel to so many countries and see people talking about that data and using that data and I'm really taken, I mean I really think it is a data and technology revolution and as Tom Wagner who's the head of Earth Action at NASA would say we've got to stop writing the Earth's obituary and yes we have enormous challenges but we have enormous capabilities that this team is and the people here at FAO and so many others are helping to enable but what's just incredible and what I see going towards 2034 are communities around the world using these and adopting these capabilities to really address the issues of deforestation. Thank you. Thank you Daniel. Yeah, so they have to buy back, you have to buy back your own data if you want to use it. You've heard a bit of people speaking here, you heard Rosalind speak about the incredible complexity of the landscape in Ghana, no? Yeah, but you really create technical challenges of course, no people trying to monitor that kind of force. How do you engage a planet with governments and with the users of the data and how do you help them tailor the data sets to the needs and uses reason? So first of all, amazing contributions from everyone. I took a lot of notes, I'll probably not cover most of them and thank you for your words, Daniel. I think I really echo your sentiment. I think that, and this is already in response to the question because I think we work with countries the same way that we work with all our customers. We really try to work together, create dialogue and innovate to find the solution. And the solution doesn't mean that you should just come by satellite data and good luck, the sale is done. It really means that we try to engage in understanding what this means, what are you trying to solve and how can we solve it together? Doesn't mean just you. We talked a lot about governments and we're talking about countries but I think it's even more than when you talk about diverse partnerships I would even say it's every single person that's involved in the problem area and right now we're really getting to a point where we're really all in the same boat and we're all in the solution not just in the problem creation. And this is a great consequence of democratizing access to data, knowledge, education, so many foundational work that has been put together to bring us all here. And this is a really winding way of saying that planets just tries to be really cooperative, solution oriented and fast. We don't want to kind of isolate or freeze into a framework solution that when it comes to the real world won't work. So we want to really be nimble and try to move forward together with a problem and as that evolves, we want to go with it. And I think that in a way the NICFIS satellite data program has been really experimenting in that. So if you just look into the paperwork it's simply a program that provides data to whoever wants to access it to work towards stopping the forestation in its topics. But in practical terms it's so much more than that. It's a community of solutions of people, it's intention from everyone and it's beautiful to see how people have different perspectives and go at it from different angles and how that knowledge and that energy is really created and shared in a really positive and impactful way. So I think that's my really long answer to your question. Maybe you can summarize it better. I like the part about the community and you see that in this panel, no? You have the data provider, no? You have the government people that come in. There's of course those in the forest countries that really have to work on it. There's the site of the donors and there's even a role for FAO in that. But yes, I'd like to turn to Fiona again to get a reaction on something that Marika said earlier because when I asked her how things have developed over the last decade or the last two decades one of the things she highlighted was that one of the engines that drove progress in innovation was the prospect of results-based finance. That is something that is connected to the UNFCCC, you know? Something that went under the label right plus for a long time. Yeah, and I'd like to really hear from Fiona about this, Fiona works for the UK, you know? Which is one of the donors really for such results-based finance and from a donor's perspective you ask yourself how good is that data, you know? Fiona, it would be interesting if you gave a few views on that, you know? Because there's a lot of countries that work towards reporting on emissions and emission reductions and technological innovations important to get towards robust estimates but years and years into the process how ready are the countries? How ready are they, you know, from the perspective of a major donor and this Fiona, over to you please for a few reflections on this, please. Thanks, Phil. And yeah, it's really interesting reflections and I think we do see, I guess, varied stages of progress for many different countries and you can really see that through the varying reporting submissions that Riko presented as well. But we also obviously see the countries have made such huge amounts of progress on enhancing transparency, generating data, using these higher resolution imagery and open source platforms and reporting to these much more stringent expectations under these high integrity standards such as FCPF and R trees. But obviously we also completely acknowledge and recognize that the policy context is continually shifting and evolving and I think that's why we understand that support needs to be provided in a way that's tailored and country led and also prioritizes that future sustainability of those elements as well. I think that's the kind of approach that we take for much of our programming and to kind of help unblock the challenges that the countries face. Aim for Forest is obviously a very critical part of that. It provides support based on new technologies and innovation but not only that to ensure that it prioritizes transferring that capacity to forest countries and their communities depending on specific needs, specific contexts and the various progress that they've made already and to ultimately be country owned. As Roslyn so rightly mentioned, the importance of ensuring that that happens. So this has really been through kind of e-learnings and courses but also kind of direct support packages targeted within currently 11 countries through Aim for Forest but hoping to expand that to 20 in the lifetime of the program. And that focuses on institutionalizing forest monitoring and also kind of ensuring that capacity is transferred as well as to indigenous people and local communities. So I think it's with that kind of thinking with that approach where we combine technological advancements we've been discussing here today with the tailored capacity building and inclusion and support that's focused on really future proofing all of this that we can begin to see that real transformational change. So we're really excited to work with FAO and GFOI and UNRED and others on Aim for Forest and really proud to see where it's gone in the last year. Also obviously acknowledged there's a lot more to be done. And also I have to kind of mention the roots of Aim for Forest as well and give credit to the UK Pact Kenya impressive project where we worked with FAO and the Union of Leicester and Kenya Forest Service and we're transferring a lot of those lessons and successes to Aim for Forests. I think that lesson learning part and the coordination that others have mentioned as well and community building is really key. I think opportunities for these like wide reaching engagements through multi-stakeholder platforms such as this and through GFOI and others and the others have been mentioned as well is really critical to kind of ensuring we're essentially simplifying the pathway to results-based payment for forest countries. Yeah, thanks. Thank you Fiona. Thank you Fiona. And good to hear you say these reflections. Look, we're getting a bit into time trouble here but I'd really like to have some time also take a few questions from the audience. I hope that people have been thinking while they were listening to things about some real sharp and interesting questions to ask. You also have some microphones in the room. I think where's the microphone? It's back there. So in case there are questions from the floor then I think you can ask that. I think there's a question over here. Maybe we can take two or three and then we can ask our panelists to respond to them. Can you also say your name please? Yes, hi. I'm Michaela Weiss from the World Resources Institute. Thanks so much for the panel. My question is about whether or if you see a role for independent monitoring in country MRV by civil society or academic institutions. Thanks. That's a good question. Independent monitoring. All right, let's take one or two more questions in order to make this more interesting. There's a question over here. Thank you. Matthias van der Voet from the EU delegation. Perhaps not surprising then. I'll touch on the EUDR, the deforestation regulation. You said Red Plus was a major innovator or driver innovation. But we also now hear a lot of criticism for the EUDR and the practical implications it has. Do you think we might quickly come across those as we have perhaps in the past 10 years for Red Plus? Thank you. Thank you. I think we can take one more maybe from this side of the room if there's an interesting question. Well, that's fine. Let me make do with those. I don't think the questions were addressed to anyone specifically. Sorry, Mr. Videoman, would you be able to bring up the two other panelists also on this screen just so that we can see whether they fidget and want to answer some of these questions that would be great? Look, yeah, maybe we just start around. Dan, would you be able to get a start with some reflections on this? I think there was a question on independent monitoring and there was a question on the EUDR also and how it relates to Red Plus and whether there can be an engine of innovation. And then maybe we go to Rosen enough to. Yeah, I think I'll take the first question on independent monitoring. I mean, I guess from my perspective, I think that ultimately it's important, I think, capacity-building capacity development is foundational to everything we do in this field. And I think that what we're seeing is so many more people having the ability to access, use these tools with, for example, in our surveyor hubs, we've done an enormous amount of training to not only governments, but civil society and university communities, whether it be tools like Google Earth Engine to some of the services that we create. And we're starting to see incredible transparency and actually checking. You have official government data and you're seeing independent monitoring, really checking across what some of the government monitoring is. So I think it's important from our perspective. Of course, we're a space agency. We like to see more people using that. But ultimately, the importance of continued capacity, building capacity development to enable these capabilities, whether it be the data itself or the tools to be used by different communities. Thank you. Thank you, Daniel. Resilient, Resilient, please also take a stop. Thank you very much, Hill. And those are two fantastic questions. So I start with an independent monitoring question. I think it depends on how a country builds its MRV system. And that will determine how the measurement and reporting is done. For example, in Ghana, I spoke about the MRV working group. They actually help us do the data collection. And then we get into the analysis and we get into the reporting itself. So CFOs are already part of that. So that process itself is to some extent independent because it has different stakeholders. It's not just government-generated data that we are submitting. It is different stakeholders that have generated. So depending on the national circumstances and how the MRV architecture is built for a particular country or a particular program or project, then you can specify whether independent monitoring is already inbuilt into the structure or you want to set it up as a standalone. But I guess the other point also is that when we talk about measurement reporting, let's remember that there is verification. And that's why for results-based payment programs and also for the carbon markets, which have the capacity to help us generate the climate finance that we are talking about, there is a third-party validation and verification. That also constitutes some level of independent monitoring because these are third parties who come in to assess what the country has measured and what the country has reported. So at every stage, no matter how you look at it, there is some level of independence in there. Probably who is doing it is what we need to look at. And the question said CSOs. So depending on how a country wants to build that, that is perfectly possible. And we are doing this in Ghana through a collective stakeholder group that has CSOs as well. And the second question on EUDR, I have different reflections on the EUDR. And I just want to say here that for a country like Ghana, we have already laced out a number of challenges we have with the EUDR. But in those challenges, we have never said that the EUDR is not good because we also want to ensure that we have transparency in our traceability systems. And we are able to actually derive the maximum benefit for our commodities, particularly to local stakeholders and local communities because if there is any short-changing, they will be the ones who will be affected the most. And they are in touch with these resources. They are the constitutive, if you talk about Koko, they constitute the small holder farmer base that we have. And so if there is any inconsistency in that chain, it will affect them. However, what we are saying is that the EUDR's approach should be one that focuses on the circumstances within a particular landscape. So the EUDR has consistently mentioned that it is a regulation that the industry needs to comply with. My question has always been, who is the industry working with? The industry is working with small holder farmers. Is the EUDR coming in to make small holder farmers poorer? I don't think so. Is the EUDR coming in place to help us address deforestation? Question is yes. Now, if the EUDR wants to address deforestation and forest degradation, but however, that's not considered an approach which would prevent farmers or which would prevent other people from expanding into more forests than it would have defeated its purpose. Because for example, if the forest definition is not what the country is using, a country like Ghana for a red plus, then it becomes a problem. If we are looking at practices that the local communities themselves do not have a handle on, then eventually we are saying that, okay, you are not able to prove and so we're not going to buy, for example, your cocoa. Well, you don't buy my cocoa. I become poorer. What do I do with the commodity? What do I do with the beans? If I become poorer, the forest is my target. I'm going back to the forest anyway, because that's what I have known until I have started this part of sustainability. So that sustainability journey must appreciate the dynamics within particular countries and the landscapes that we are working in. That's what, for example, Ghana has been saying about the EUDR and if we are able to address this systematically and put in place a very good transition that recognizes the different stakeholder interests and does not just have interventions that are pushed onto industry and industry can just choose and decide to go here or go there and in the long run, make communities poorer, then we are going to be on the right path. So that is what we are saying. And I think that the EUDR may be in five or 10 years, we can be saying that it has achieved the same status that Red Cross wanted to achieve or it's complementary. But let's know that, for example, Red Cross and why it is today, I mentioned that Ghana started this in 2008. It's been 15 to 16 years. It's been a long journey. It's been a process of taking people along, of having consultations, of testing what would work. We didn't just start and just have a couple of dates and say, if you are not able to comply by this time, that's it. No, that's not how things work. So if we are able to have that transformative thinking for how the EUDR would work, I believe that it can mimic some of the successes that we have had within our Red Cross journeys. Thank you. Thank you, Rosalind. I can feel the passion when I listen to you, Rosalind. And that is what makes us so exciting, so interesting. Everyone, our time is up together. I wish we could continue, but we cannot. I think we will have to return the word back to Julian. Now, Julian, I hope that we have begun proving your point that foresters are an innovative bunch, after all. Small applause, please, for this panel. Thank you. Thank you so much, Till and everybody.