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Forest ecosystems play an indispensable role in addressing various pressing sustainability and social-ecological challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and ecosystem services deterioration, hence the monitoring of the world's forests is crucial. As part of the global forest assessment workflow, a forest is generally classified and...

Climate change has caused vulnerability not only to the forest ecosystem but also to forest-dependent communities. Therefore, its management is essential to increase forest ecosystem services and reduce vulnerability to climate change using an integrated approach. Although many scientific studies examined climate change impact on forest ecosystems...

This report covers the technical assessment of the voluntary submission of Thailand on its proposed forest reference emission level (FREL) and forest reference level (FRL) in accordance with decision 13/CP.19. The author at IGES (Chisa Umemiya) served as a member of the technical assessment team.

Despite the growing global support for capacity building to improve soil management, the estimation and reporting of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and removals, especially from mineral soils in national GHG inventories, is still very limited. In 2021, the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES) and FAO conducted a global survey to...

Forests are an important natural resource and are instrumental in sustaining environmental sustainability. Burning biomass in forests results in greenhouse gas emissions, many of which are longlived. Precise and consistent broad-scale monitoring of fire intensity is a valuable tool for analyzing climate and ecological changes related to fire...

Illumination variations in non-atmospherically corrected high-resolution satellite (HRS) images acquired at different dates/times/locations pose a major challenge for large-area environmental mapping and monitoring. This problem is exacerbated in cases where a classification model is trained only on one image (and often limited training data) but...

Although many researchers highlight the benefits of Urban Green Spaces (UGS) to city dwellers, understanding of residents’ emotional association with UGS remains an incomplete and exciting area of place research. In this study, we conducted an empirical assessment of residents’ Place Attachment (PA) towards UGS in the Greater Tokyo region. For this...

Agricultural certification schemes are increasingly requiring concession holders to prevent deforestation when they develop plantations but do not sufficiently address forest restoration, which is necessary to prevent further biodiversity loss. This policy brief recommends, by focusing on palm oil, that agricultural certification schemes strengthen...

CONSERVATION, RESTORATION AND management of forest resources are critical for addressing climate change. Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) are a vehicle for targeted climate actions, including those related to forest management, by countries towards contributing global efforts agreed under the Paris Agreement. Operationalizing climate...

The original aim of Goal 7 of New York Declaration on Forests (NYDF) has been met: the Paris Agreement confirms forests’ pivotal role in the international climate agenda. But at a time when the protection, restoration, and sustainable management of forests have never been more urgent, global forest loss is in a worrying upward trend. It is still...