Delivering Forest Ambition: The Need for Harmonized, Equitable Accountability

At COP28 in Dubai (2023), parties adopted the United Arab Emirates consensus—including the outcome of the first global stocktake (GST1)—which identifies the actions needed to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement. Within GST1, parties emphasized the importance of “enhanced efforts toward halting and reversing deforestation and forest degradation by 2030.” The language reflects the United Nations Strategic Plan on Forests 2017–2030 and the declaration of the high-level segment of the 19th session of the U.N. Forum on Forests; reinforces the Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forests and Land Use (Glasgow declaration) at COP26 (2021); and aligns with the Kunming-Montreal Biodiversity Framework’s intent to “halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030” and target to “bring the loss of areas of high ecological importance, including ecosystems of high ecological integrity, close to zero by 2030.”

This 2030 goal recognizes the essential role of forest protection and restoration to both climate mitigation and adaptation. By encompassing both deforestation and forest degradation, GST1 affirms the need for comprehensive action across all forest types and regions, and pertaining to all sectors.

Unfortunately, progress toward this target is severely deficient, and major policy roadblocks, if unaddressed, make timely success unlikely. Most fundamentally, major discrepancies remain in how countries—especially those with large commercial forestry sectors—evaluate, monitor, and report on deforestation, degradation, and land-sector emissions.

Forest policy is highly fragmented, both across institutions and agreements, including the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the U.N. Environment Programme, and UNFCCC, as well as between countries. This not only hinders synergistic international governance but also leads to inconsistent definitions, monitoring standards, and reporting practices between countries—particularly around the concept of “degradation.”

Despite the mandated pursuit of the Paris Agreement “in light of equity,” global forest policy generally lacks “reflexive responsibility” for the Global North. In the Global North, transparency tends to be lower and impacts such as loss of primary and old-growth forests often go untracked. As environmentalist Vandana Shiva noted in “International Controversy Over Sustainable Forestry” (Green Globe Yearbook, 1993), institutionalized bias toward oversight of tropical forests has undermined progress for decades and must be addressed for the international community to overcome its cycle of failed forest commitments.

In response, in 2023, the African Ministerial Conference on the Environment issued a declaration calling for the development of an “accountability framework as a means of driving global progress and promoting greater equity between forest protection standards.” More than 130 civil society organizations from around the world have subsequently reinforced this call.

In October 2025, the IUCN World Conservation Congress adopted a new IUCN resolution: Delivering harmonized accountability and means of implementation for international forest protection goals. This resolution acknowledges that “there often remain inconsistencies in approaches to defining, monitoring, and reporting on forest degradation and associated terms and metrics, particularly among parties with differing forest biomes and national circumstances” and mobilizes the IUCN around aligning countries' standards and transparency related to halting and reversing deforestation and forest degradation by 2030.

In the absence of sufficient international guidance, countries have pursued divergent approaches to defining and reporting on their progress toward halting and reversing deforestation and forest degradation.

The most rigorous transparency processes are tied to results-based financing in developing countries, leaving a vacuum around reporting on boreal and temperate forests. Even where there are global processes, the focus is largely on reporting on impacts in the tropics.

While deforestation is largely concentrated in tropical regions, forest degradation happens globally. Boreal and temperate forests have some of the largest rates of tree cover loss from industrial logging, much of this in primary and old-growth forests. Yet, because of the institutionalized focus on tropical reporting, there is much less visibility into these non-conversion impacts in northern forest regions.

For example, in 2025, the FAO’s Forest Resources Assessment (FRA) requested that countries indicate whether they monitor forest degradation and, if so, to provide their working definition of degradation and their monitoring processes and results. Only 59 countries, representing 37 percent of the global forest area, reported that they have a definition. Seventeen other countries reported that they have adopted definitions from other sources or have criteria for monitoring degradation. Oceania, Asia, and South America all had more than 65 percent of their forests covered by a national definition, while in Africa, 37 percent was covered. North and Central America had 10 percent of forests covered by a degradation definition, and Europe just 1 percent.

The substance of what countries are tracking and reporting also varies significantly, with few countries including key criteria such as loss of biodiversity, loss of forest services, and forest disturbances. Fewer than half used remote sensing as part of their monitoring systems.

Globally, only about half of primary forests are accounted for in monitoring. There is no comprehensive spatial data on primary forests in boreal, temperate, and dry tropical forests, making it difficult to track the extent of degradation in those regions.

The use of terms like “sustainable forest management” (SFM) further hinders transparency. SFM remains poorly defined and inconsistently applied, yet it is frequently used as the metric in communications on the actions of high-income countries. It is also prevalent in countries’ NDCs. In the 64 new NDCs from parties between January 1, 2024, and September 1, 2025, 56 percent of countries reported SFM as part of their forest-related climate action, while only 27 percent described measures for reducing deforestation and 22 percent for reducing forest degradation.

Poor transparency begets poor transparency: Because of the relatively limited data on forest degradation in boreal and temperate forests, reports from both international organizations and civil society on global forests trends do not focus as much on these regions. As a result, the majority of the focus remains on those countries already subject to scrutiny. Meanwhile, the normalization of deforestation as the main criterion for priority countries in reports contributes to the erasure of non-conversion impacts elsewhere.

This gap also means that there are limited mechanisms for assessing the actions of developed countries, even when regulatory changes—such as the recent forest protection rollbacks in the United States—present new risks.

These inconsistencies make it difficult to compare progress or incentivize better practices across global supply chains. Effective monitoring, reporting, and verification systems require comparability and interoperability to drive coherent global analyses. In addition, fragmented decision making and ambiguous definitions themselves foster inequity. As noted in "The Performance of Global Forest Governance: Three Contrasting Perspectives" (Forest Policy and Economics, 2024), parties with the greatest resources and staff will have the greatest likelihood of influencing outcomes.

The COP30 presidency’s focus on being “United for our Forests” and its call to build “a global infrastructure of trust,” present parties with a critical opportunity to strengthen forest-related implementation under the Paris Agreement and GST1.

Addressing the accountability gaps and inconsistencies does not require creating a new treaty or agreement; there is already a robust regime of international reporting on forest impacts. Rather, additional principles and safeguards can promote clarification and harmonization across existing UNFCCC accountability mechanisms such as the GST follow-up, NDC guidance, and transparency frameworks. As a first step, parties should recognize the need to harmonize standards and transparency.

Ultimately, outcomes of this harmonization process should include:

• Clear responsibilities under the convention: Parties should reaffirm the importance of fair and effective implementation of forest-related goals, taking into account differing national circumstances and capacities. In line with the principles of the convention and Paris Agreement, parties should coordinate with relevant international bodies to define objectives and expectations that support greater alignment and comparability. All countries should ensure that domestic forest policies and actions are clearly reflected in their NDCs and other relevant reporting, including under the enhanced transparency framework.
• Common monitoring: To address disparities in how metrics, such as primary forest loss, are tracked, parties should adopt comparable monitoring criteria. The UNFCCC, in coordination with other relevant bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, FAO, and CBD, should provide methodological guidance and technical support. Targeted capacity-building should be provided to developing countries to enable access to technology, training, and institutional resources.
• Standardized reporting: Countries should report on forest-sector progress using standardized templates and indicators that enable cross-national comparability and evaluation. These templates should be developed in collaboration with the other Rio conventions to streamline reporting across climate and biodiversity agendas.

To lay the groundwork for the achievement of global forest targets, we urge parties to issue the following language as part of the outcome of COP30:

• Recognizing the critical role of forests in achieving the long-term goals of the Paris Agreement

• Recalling the emphasis in the first global stocktake on halting and reversing deforestation and forest degradation by 2030

• Affirming the importance of enhancing transparency and promoting consistency and harmonized standards with a view to improving the quality, completeness, and comparability of information reported by parties on forest-related actions under the Paris Agreement