Options for FAO Reporting on Trees Outside Forests

Policy Briefing #25 (v1) is provided as an input to the FAO review of monitoring and reporting methods for Trees Outside Forests to be used in 2030 Forest Resource Assessment (with the review scheduled for completion in 2025).  EURAF recommends greater coordination with the UNFCCC forest definitions and the move towards wall-to-wall identification of “lands” in national LULUCF inventories (particularly in Annex I countries). We also suggest that quantification of TOF should be based on the crown area of trees in agricultural land (croplands and grasslands) and in settlements. The opportunity could be taken to move away from the minimum block size threshold (0.5ha) used in the FAO categories of Other Wooded Land  and Other Land With Tree Cover. Country-wide remote sensing techniques are increasingly available to estimate the crown area of individual trees, tree lines and small copses, irrespective of block-size.  As an intermediate step, EU Member States are encouraged to contribute more completely to the TOF categories being used in the FRA-2025.