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Good practice Imported

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

Zambia · Lusaka · See the Zambia profile · See the Lusaka profile

Evidence: Observational / pre–post Top 89% 27/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

Zambia's Forestry Department built a national forest monitoring system with FAO's Open Foris and SEPAL satellite-processing tools, producing Landsat-based national forest-cover mosaics for 2000, 2010 and 2014 that feed its REDD+ reference level amid some of the world's highest de

2.63 billion tonnes
Forest carbon stock
23 %
Forests formally managed
380,000 hectares
Natural forest lost (2020) (2020)
250,000-300,000 hectares/year
Annual deforestation rate

Details

Maturity
Established
Promoter
Zambia Forestry Department, Ministry of Green Economy and Environment, with FAO and FCPF support
Period
2010–present
Keywords
forestry, remote sensing, carbon accounting, land use

Context

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 and II) and financed in part through the World Bank's Forest Carbon Partnership Facility.

Activities

The NFMS applies FAO's Open Foris suite — Collect Earth for point-sampling and SEPAL for cloud-based processing — to Landsat imagery via Google Earth Engine, producing national forest-cover mosaics for 2000, 2010 and 2014 that feed Zambia's Forest Reference (Emission) Level submission to the UNFCCC.

Results

ILUA data put Zambia's forest carbon stock at roughly 2.63 billion tonnes and found only 23% of 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.

Conclusions

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.

Implementation
Indicative cost
Medium (€50k–€500k)
Time to results
Long (> 3 years) — ILUA I 2005-2008, ILUA II 2010-2016; NFMS operational since 2010, ongoing.
Staffing & skills
Zambia Forestry Department / Ministry of Green Economy and Environment, FAO technical support, Financed in part through World Bank Forest Carbon Partnership Facility

Conditions for success

  • Technical capacity built via FAO's Open Foris/SEPAL tools and Google Earth Engine processing
  • Sustained multi-year investment since ILUA I began in 2005

Common failure modes

  • Measurement/reporting system does not itself curb deforestation
  • Gap between wall-to-wall satellite tracking and on-the-ground enforcement capacity
  • Deforestation rate remains among the world's highest despite over a decade of monitoring

Commonly funded by

National / regional programmes

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Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

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