GFOI Capacity Building Summit

University of Maryland, College Park – Jan 31 - Feb 3, 2023

Background

Led by the US SilvaCarbon Program, the Global Forest Observations Initiative (GFOI) convenes a Capacity Building Summit every few years to bring together countries and development partners to discuss, plan and refine international collaboration on capacity building support to countries on forest monitoring and MRV issues. The last GFOI Capacity Building Summit was convened in Kathmandu, Nepal in September 2017 and yielded several new collaborative activities as well as GFOI’s first principles for capacity building good practice. Since then, much has changed for the GFOI community and how capacity building support is delivered. The next Summit is convene in the Washington DC area during this week and provides an opportunity to refresh these principles and the broader collaborative approaching to capacity building under GFOI.

Objectives

The goals for the GFOI Capacity Building Summit 2023 are to:

● Update on country progress and capacity building partner activities in the post-pandemic world

● Refresh the GFOI’s principles for good practice capacity building, including the role of GFOI partners’ new products and processes that have emerged in recent years

● Address hot topics and common challenges, such as coordination of capacity building support for: reporting standards, early warning systems, mangrove monitoring and generating emissions factors with space-based data

● Further the development of GFOI’s new Country-Led Planning (CLP) process, including consultations with development partners and countries on two early pilots

● Introduce countries and partners to the GFOI Family of Resources (GFoR) and consider its role in capacity building activities.