Branching out: Synergies in forest assessments and climate transparency reporting

Forests are dynamic repositories of carbon, biodiversity and ecological resilience, offering numerous additional ecosystem services beyond their commonly known advantages. The land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF) sector plays a dual role in global emissions, acting as both a source and a sink for greenhouse gases.The Enhanced Transparency Framework of the Paris Agreement establishes standardized reporting requirements for all countries, ensuring comprehensive, consistent and comparable reporting. The Biennial Transparency Reports (BTRs) emerged out of this framework as a new approach to international climate reporting to track the progress of national determined contributions.The Global Forest Resources Assessment (FRA) of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is the global reference of data on forest resources of 236 countries and territories. Since 2005, the FRA reporting process has built on reports prepared by officially nominated national correspondents. FRA data are used to support LULUCF reporting under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). In this context, countries could utilize the same data to report to other processes – such as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation.The FRA and BTR reporting contains an extensive set of complementary indicators and metrics that show significant topical overlap, despite variations in terminology and methodological approaches.This study explores how synergies between FAO’s FRA and the UNFCCC’s BTRs can streamline reporting processes by enhancing data quality, reducing national reporting burden and strengthening evidence-based climate action. Thereby, the study seeks to determine synergies, critical areas of collaborations, methodological gaps and useful linkages for enhanced forest-climate data management and reporting.Information from national forest monitoring systems is the main source of information for FRA and is essential for BTR greenhouse gases inventory reporting. Aligning the timing of data compilation, review, and verification processes can enhance the traceability and consistency of reported information. Enhancing synergies among focal points internally and externally, as well as cooperation between the two networks, requires establishing communication channels, regular joint meetings and consistent coordination.Such technical recommendations for the incorporation of FRA and BTR can facilitate future Global Stocktake processes and the Global Goal on Adaptation through internally and externally consistent forest-related information reported by countries.