The Governors’ Climate and Forests Task Force (GCF Task Force), in collaboration with Emmett Institute on Climate Change & the Environment at UCLA School of Law and the UCLA Institute of the Environment & Sustainability, will host its first Remote Sensing Workshop this June 5-8, thanks in part to the funding and support from NORAD, NICFI, and USAID.
Following on a Memorandum of Understanding with CTrees that was signed at our Annual Meeting in Mérida, Yucatán in February 2023, this Remote Sensing Technical Workshop has been designed for representatives of GCF Task Force member jurisdictions, based on responses to an initial technical survey. It will promote access to state-of-the-art carbon measurement tools, identify needs and gaps in technical capacity of interested GCF Task Force member jurisdictions, and support filling in those gaps.
The workshop will bring together technical staff representatives of GCF Task Force member jurisdictions for four days of exchanges with CTrees, UCLA’s Center for Tropical Research, Planet Labs, Global Forest Watch, and SERVIR GLOBAL. We expect to cover remote sensing data collection methodologies, geospatial tools, and data processing capabilities, as well as discussions on jurisdictions’ practical experiences with existing tools and specific needs to improve capabilities, including for monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV). The workshop will work through: (1) what data is available, (2) how is it collected, (3) how is it processed, analyzed, and used from a technical perspective, and (4) how it can best support decision-making and resource management needs of GCF Task Force jurisdictions.