PNG's National Forest Monitoring System — Satellite & Radar-Based Carbon Tracking

Built from 2014 with support from Japan's JICA (PNGFA/JICA Phase II) and expanded through a National Forest Inventory launched in 2016 with the European Union, the Global Environment Facility, the UK's AIM4Forests programme and UN-REDD, Papua New Guinea's forest monitoring system underlies the country's REDD+ reporting to the UNFCCC.
The system combines satellite imagery and radar — needed to see through the persistent cloud cover over PNG's remote terrain — with FAO's Open Foris Collect Earth GIS point-sampling tool. Ground teams verify the remote-sensing results across roughly 1,000 forest monitoring clusters, tracking carbon stocks, 12 vegetation types and biodiversity data, published on a public Forest & Land Use Monitoring Geo-Portal.
PNG's Forest Reference Level submission documented 261,528 hectares cleared between 2000 and 2015 (average emissions of roughly 5 million tCO2e per year), and the UNFCCC subsequently verified 9 million tonnes of CO2 emission reductions for 2014-2015 — the country's first nationally issued REDD+ forestry carbon credits.
87% of PNG's historical deforestation is driven by agricultural conversion (63% subsistence shifting cultivation, 30% commercial, much of the latter oil-palm) that the monitoring system tracks but cannot itself curb; commercial-logging degradation peaked at 240,000 hectares in a single year (2012). Coverage of PNG's 2021 UNFCCC report noted only that a national forest monitoring system is a prerequisite for REDD+ verification, without detailing how consistently it operates outside the JICA/EU-funded project areas — a reminder that donor-built MRV capacity does not automatically translate into nationwide enforcement.

Read the full analysis: https://openjicareport.jica.go.jp/pdf/12326229_01.pdf