Designing and implementing successful policies for sustainable development requires accurate measures of policy outcomes, specifically, the impacts on forests. Forest monitoring tools are multifaceted; able to measure forest condition and extent, detect sudden changes, and analyze longer-term trends. The objective of this report is to summarize and characterize the current suite of forest monitoring tools and review how they are being used by World Bank Group (WBG) funded projects to monitor or reduce deforestation, direct or indirect, resulting from those projects.
Methods to gather the report information included a literature review of forest monitoring tools; a desktop study of WBG projects in the online database in seven focal countries (Brazil, Colombia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Indonesia, Liberia, Mozambique, and Peru); and interviews with WBG staff. The results of the study show there exist dozens of “top-down”, or satellite-based, forest monitoring tools that operate at multiple scales. Although most global tools are operated by the US and EU, national tools operated by developing countries are emerging more recently with the focus on capacity building for national forest monitoring systems. There are also a handful of free and open source mobile applications available specifically for “bottom-up” monitoring for patrolling and community-based monitoring. The diverse set of existing forest monitoring tools are used for a range of applications and audiences. In fact, fitting the tool to the application is key for choosing a forest monitoring tool. There are two general applications of forest monitoring tools with tradeoffs between accuracy and timeliness of information. These are 1) informing policy and practice; and 2) enabling rapid response.
