Zambia's National Forest Monitoring System — Landsat-Based Deforestation Tracking

Zambia's Forestry Department, under what is now the Ministry of Green Economy and Environment, developed its National Forest Monitoring System (NFMS) with FAO technical support, building on the Integrated Land Use Assessment (ILUA I, 2005-2008; ILUA II, 2010-2016) and financed in part through the World Bank's Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF).
The NFMS applies FAO's Open Foris suite — Collect Earth for point-sampling over satellite basemaps, and SEPAL for cloud-based Earth-observation processing — to Landsat imagery, producing single-best-pixel national forest-cover mosaics for 2000, 2010 and 2014 via a Google Earth Engine processing chain. These outputs feed Zambia's Forest Reference (Emission) Level submission to the UNFCCC.
ILUA data put Zambia's forest carbon stock at roughly 2.63 billion tonnes and found that only 23% of the country's forests are formally managed. Independent satellite tracking by Global Forest Watch recorded 380,000 hectares of natural forest lost in 2020 alone (about 140 million tonnes of CO2), consistent with FAO's characterisation of Zambia's 250,000-300,000 ha/year loss rate as among the highest in the world.
The NFMS is a measurement and reporting system, not a conservation intervention in itself: despite more than a decade of monitoring investment since ILUA I began in 2005, Zambia's deforestation rate has remained among the world's highest, and the gap between wall-to-wall satellite tracking and on-the-ground enforcement capacity is the strategy's acknowledged weak point.

Read the full analysis: https://openknowledge.fao.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/de0267cc-407c-42c3-b6e0-d9510f5519cf/content