Technical assistance to Guinea’s National Forest Monitoring System (NFMS) Guinea

Context of the service

Guinea does not have an updated national forest inventory, only disparate and old data, concerning certain specific forest areas (some dense forests in Forest Guinea or some mangroves in Maritime Guinea).

The vast majority of Guinea's forests are therefore not monitored, whether in terms of the supply of wood and non-timber forest products, the provision of ecosystem services (maintenance of biodiversity, protection of water and soil, carbon sequestration, etc.), or pressure factors (felling for agriculture, bush fires, etc.). unsustainable fuelwood collection, etc.)

This technical assistance has therefore been mobilized to initiate the establishment of a National Forest Monitoring System (NFMS), based in particular on the recent Agroecological Zoning of Guinea (ZAEG).

One of the primary objectives of this SNSF is to facilitate Guinea's participation in the REDD+ process by allowing the estimation of greenhouse gas emissions/removals, but this NFMS will eventually have multiple uses (monitoring fires, wood harvesting, etc.).

Services provided

Within the IGN-FI (leader) / SalvaTerra / ONFI Consortium, SalvaTerra has focused on estimating greenhouse gas emissions/removals from the forest sector, following the latest IPCC guidelines:

- Estimation of activity data: 14 categories of land use and land use change, data estimated from ZAEG data and refined with new analyses of a sample of 1,700 plots of 1 km²;

- Estimation of emission factors: based on IPCC default values or on specific data (forest biomass stocks based on global biomass maps, surface area and seasonality of fires based on MODIS data, volumes of timber harvested based on FAO data, etc.);

- Cross-referencing of these data to estimate removals due to natural increase and emissions due to timber harvesting, bush fires, agricultural felling, etc. Overall, forests in Guinea are a notable source: +38 MteqCO2/year.

- Calculation of uncertainties on the above-mentioned estimates: the uncertainties are generally high, due to the lack of specific and reliable data.

Summary of the service

Technical assistance to Guinea's National Forest Monitoring System (SNSF): Estimation of areas (activity data) in terms of land use and land use change; Estimation of emission factors, based on IPCC default values or on specific data (forest biomass, bush fires, fuelwood, etc.); Estimation of greenhouse gas emissions/removals from the forest sector; Calculation of uncertainties on these estimates.