Our work with civil society groups in forest-rich countries to engage with policy makers to improve access to information and advocate for capable, responsive and accountable forest sector governance – including through Independent Forest Monitoring.
Global Witness pioneered Independent Forest Monitoring (IFM) between 1999 and 2008, through which we promoted cooperation between governments, civil society, and the private sector in timber-producing countries such as Cambodia, Cameroon, Honduras and Nicaragua.
Through the provision of publicly accessible, objective information on the control of activities in the forest sector, IFM addressed governance and transparency and supported forest law enforcement. IFM is, in effect, a form of systems or governance monitoring.
Between 2009 and 2012 we continued working with local activist groups in Latin America and Africa, piloting a report card approach to assess public access to forest information.
Alongside this, we used our IFM expertise to develop the concept of Independent Monitoring of REDD (IM-REDD), advocating it as a core building block in the overall REDD+ architecture.
This report presents a detailed review and analysis of lessons learned from implementing IFM in practice, to inform monitoring reduced greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD).
