How Tropical Forest Countries Can Modernize Carbon Accounting—and Unlock More Climate Finance

Forests are a defining theme of COP30, both symbolically and substantially. Framed as the “Amazon COP”, a measure of success of this year’s COP will be progress made to strengthen policies and financing schemes for forest conservation and restoration.

One key aspect that enables this progress is improved forest carbon monitoring. And this year’s COP can be an inflection point for how governments measure forest conservation progress and thereby unlock more commensurate carbon finance that reflects the work being done on the ground by communities. 

Today, many countries continue to rely on costly and cumbersome approaches that only produce coarse estimates of actual and avoided forest emissions. This can now change.

Governments can now gain access to monitoring technologies that are faster, cheaper and—critically—that capture actual and avoided emissions more fully.

In many jurisdictions, the largest share of forest emissions now comes from forest degradation, not deforestation. So including it in baselines and monitoring efforts is critical to unlock higher volumes of high-integrity climate finance.

Chloris’s continuous mapping of above-ground biomass change at the jurisdictional scale is the technological innovation that empowers governments to achieve that step change. Here is how:

Shortcomings of traditional monitoring approaches

In many places across the tropics, forest carbon emissions are estimated in the same way as it was done in 1995, when the first COP took place in Berlin.

It often relies on visual interpretation of satellite images to identify deforestation events (“activity data”), used in combination with rough estimates of the forest biomass (“emission factors”) to set baselines and estimate carbon emissions.

That approach has major shortcomings for tropical forest countries:

• It tends to omit forest degradation and therefore risks significantly reducing the potentially available carbon finance for distribution by REDD+ programs.
• It is costly and cumbersome to update, posing challenges to governments with limited resources.
• Maps often remain static for many years, which can delay carbon payments, even if real progress was achieved.
• Current methods are not easily verifiable, limiting their use in voluntary markets and complicating project nesting within national systems.

Opportunities that Chloris data creates for jurisdictions

The Chloris approach empowers governments to step away from traditional monitoring that uses activity data and emission factors. By monitoring biomass change wall-to-wall—rather than estimating forest area change and applying an average biomass stock—it captures the full spectrum of forest carbon change, including emissions from degradation and removals from reforestation. And it does so by harnessing technological innovations that unlock major efficiency gains for governments.

Here is what this means for tropical forest countries:

• Unlock more carbon finance
• By monitoring biomass change at the pixel level, rather than estimating forest area change, governments can capture the full spectrum of forest dynamics, including emissions from degradation and removals from reforestation. This approach also reduces baseline and monitoring uncertainty, allowing REDD+ efforts at both project and jurisdictional scales to be more accurately recognized and more fairly compensated.
• Save time and money
• Compared to traditional methods that rely on visual interpretation and extensive fieldwork, the Chloris data enables near-instant creation and annual updating of Forest Reference Emission Levels (FRELs) at a fraction of the cost. Governments can now replace months, or even years, of cumbersome, manual analysis with rapid, accurate updates that strengthen transparency and continuity in reporting. 
• Policy and REDD+ coherence
• Because of its consistency and scalability, the Chloris product allows for a “one map” approach that enables seamless nesting of REDD+ projects within national REDD+ systems. This reduces complexity and promotes consistency across REDD+ programs and UNFCCC reporting. The Chloris biomass stock-change dataset is compliant for use with UNFCCC and IPCC Guidelines for stock-change measurement using remote-sensing.

Thirty years after the first COP was held in Berlin, Belém can be the moment where tropical forest countries transition into the next phase of forest conservation and restoration, empowered by modern, accurate forest carbon monitoring at the jurisdictional scale. Chloris stands ready to support every government ready to take that step forward.