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National monitoring of forests is essential for tracking progress towards various global environmental goals, including those of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the Paris Agreement. Inconsistent national definitions of “forest”, however, can complicate the tracking of global progress towards achieving these goals. The FAO’s...

IGES Joint Crediting Mechanism (JCM) Database provides detailed information on the JCM methodologies, projects, and JCM feasibility studies to be utilized for research and development of JCM project. The JCM is being implemented under bilateral cooperation between Japan and 29 partner countries: Mongolia, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Kenya, Maldives, Viet...

Due to the cumulative effects of rapid urbanization, population growth and climate change, many inland and coastal water bodies around the world are experiencing severe water pollution. To help make land-use and climate change adaptation policies more effective at a local scale, this study used a combination of participatory approaches and computer...

Although it is widely acknowledged that forests provide critical ecosystem services for human survival and well-being, in the Asia-Pacific region forests are being converted to other land uses and degraded at alarming rates. One underlying factor for this destruction of forests is market failure. Forests are cleared for other land uses or degraded...

Municipal solid waste management (MSWM) is considered one of the serious environmental issues in the Philippines, with corresponding linkages to the climate change and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, methane (CH4) linked with indiscriminate dumping of municipal solid waste has received the much attention with regard to public health...

Literature suggests a significant potential for synergies among climate change adaptation and mitigation (CCA & M) policies, especially in urban areas. However, the understanding of how best to integrate CCA &M is limited despite the fact that there is an increasing interest, particularly in Southeast Asian countries, in achieving the integration...

This dataset contains maps of forests and other land with tree cover in the Philippines as of the year 2020. The data can be downloaded directly here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1dPdRbmPjTRJKtOuOa5s2lMXvIEcfhw-… The dataset contains three georeferenced maps: (1) A map of lands identified as "Open forest", "Closed forest", or...

We use crowdsourced GIS data from OpenStreetMap to help automate the mapping of land cover in Landsat satellite imagery. The OpenStreetMap data had limited area coverage, but was useful for building a model which could classify land cover in the other areas.

We developed a method for mapping residential areas using freely available satellite imagery. The resultant residential area map can be used for risk assessment (e.g. to estimate the population living in a flood-prone area). Our method can be applied for flood risk assessment in other watersheds in the future.

Partly due to the worldwide upsurge in industrial demand for timber, the number of planted forests has increased ten-fold in the last 20 years. These planted forests currently comprise only about 5% of the world’s forest area, but supply 35% of industrial logs and have critical roles to play in releasing pressure on natural forests, mitigating...