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Across regions, forests are measured, mapped, and managed by people working in national forest services, universities, research institutes, and local projects.
As climate commitments expand and reporting requirements grow, the skills needed to work with forest data continue to change. New methods, tools, and expectations place increasing demands on the people responsible for collecting, managing, and using forest information. Learning, in this context, is not about starting from zero. It is about keeping pace, sharing approaches, and strengthening systems over time.
Learning at scale, across regions
Over the past years, FAO has supported a growing learning offer focused on forest data and climate action. Together, these courses have reached thousands of learners worldwide.
Participants include forestry officers, students, researchers, individuals, and staff from national institutions. Many work in small teams. Many balance learning with daily operational responsibilities. All contribute, in different ways, to the collection and use of forest data at national, regional, and global levels.
Participation has been broad. Learners come from all regions, with strong engagement from youth, women, and indigenous peoples. Access has been free, multilingual, and online, allowing people to learn without stepping away from their work or relocating for training, giving them the same opportunity.
Learning together through online facilitated courses
Some of the most intensive learning takes place through online facilitated courses. These courses combine structured content with live sessions, peer exchange through forums, and guided assignments. Participants work through real scenarios, drawing on their own national contexts and learning from others facing similar constraints.
Two courses have played a central role in this approach.
The National Forest Inventory online facilitated course, delivered in 2024, focused on how countries design, implement, and sustain forest inventories. It covered sampling design, field data collection, quality control, and data management, while linking technical steps to national reporting and policy needs.
The Institutionalization of Forest Data online facilitated course, delivered in 2025. The course aimed to strengthen NFMS by mastering its core elements and governance, applying strategic and legal tools, and enhancing data sharing and transparency for long-term forest monitoring success. Through the CBIT-Forest Phase II project and its virtual global capacity-building activities, these two courses alone taught almost 3 000 individuals. Thirty-four per cent of participants were women, and 57 per cent were youth.
Self-paced learning for flexible access
Not all learners can commit to online facilitated courses. Workloads, time zones, and connectivity vary widely. For this reason, self-paced eLearning remains a core part of the learning offer.
These courses allow learners to move at their own pace while covering complex topics in a structured way. They are used both by individuals seeking to strengthen specific skills and by institutions looking for consistent training material that can be reused over time.
The self-paced courses cover topics such as forests and transparency under the Paris Agreement, national forest inventories, and others. Several courses are also organised as learning journeys, guiding learners through a sequence of modules rather than standalone topics. This approach helps learners understand how field data, data management, and reporting are connected, rather than treating them as separate tasks.
To date, self-paced courses have been accessed by thousands of learners. Work continues to strengthen gender-disaggregated data to better understand who is being reached and where further efforts are needed.
The self-paced learning offer includes the following courses and language versions:
From individual learning to institutional practice
Learning has the greatest impact when it feeds into institutions.
Universities and national forestry institutions are increasingly using the National Forest Inventory and Institutionalization of Forest Data courses as part of formal training programmes. Some integrate them into university curricula. Others use them to onboard new staff or refresh skills ahead of inventory cycles and reporting deadlines.
This integration supports continuity. It reduces reliance on ad hoc training and helps align methods across departments and generations of staff. It also creates common reference points between practitioners, researchers, and policymakers.
A lecturer using the courses within a forestry programme explained it simply: “The course gives students a solid technical base. We can then focus on local applications and field experience.”
Why education matters for forest data
Forest data is often discussed in technical terms: plots, pixels, equations, and uncertainty. Education connects these elements to decision-making.
When field teams understand why specific measurements matter, data quality improves. When data managers understand reporting requirements, datasets become more usable. When institutions share common approaches, trust in national forest data grows.
Education also helps address staff turnover. Many forest institutions face frequent changes in personnel. Without structured learning, knowledge can be lost. Courses and learning journeys help new staff step into roles with a clearer understanding of existing systems and expectations.
At the same time, learning makes challenges visible. Not all institutions have stable internet access. Not all staff can dedicate time to training. Language barriers persist. Some learners complete courses but struggle to apply them without institutional backing.
Recognising these realities is part of strengthening education itself.
Education as a shared space
Beyond technical skills, the courses create networks. Learners meet peers working in different regions but facing similar questions. They exchange practical solutions, templates, and experiences. In many cases, these exchanges continue after a course ends.
This shared learning space matters in a field where methods need to be comparable across countries, while contexts differ widely. Education becomes a way to align approaches without ignoring national realities.
The courses are also further promoted and expanded through partnerships, for example, under UN-REDD’s REDD+ Academy, which brings together multiple organizations, training providers, and country programmes working on REDD+ and forest-related climate action. Through the Academy, learning materials are shared even more widely, adapted to different contexts, and connected to broader capacity-building efforts.
Looking ahead
Education in forest data and monitoring is ongoing. As climate commitments evolve and technologies develop, learning needs will continue to shift.
Future courses will need to respond to new reporting requirements, emerging data sources, and increasing expectations for transparency. They will also need to remain accessible to learners working with limited time, connectivity, and resources. What remains constant is the role of education as a foundation. Without skilled people and shared understanding, forest data systems cannot function.
We invite all those interested to join our selection of courses that are free, available anywhere and anytime, and offer digital badge certification important for academic recognition.
More learning opportunities
FAO’s forestry eLearning offer also counts learning materials beyond forest monitoring and data, generated through a combination of efforts from programmes and initiatives, including UN-REDD, such as Enhancing policy coherence through public expenditure analysis for forests, previously promoted on this channel, which supports countries in strengthening links between policy priorities and public expenditure. Additional courses are currently under development on halting deforestation through sustainable agrifood systems transformation (based on the Solutions-tree digital toolkit), and on community-based forestry management, further expanding the learning offer across forest-related policy and practice.
Originally published on un-redd.org