PCSD Staff joined the Regional Workshop on Lessons Learned and Demonstration of Se.Plan for Forest Restoration in Southeast Asia Countries held last 13-16 May in Bangkok, Thailand. The said activity was intended to facilitate knowledge sharing and demonstration of practical applications of the Se.Plan tools for forest restoration in the region. The four-day event catered discussions and presentations from pilot countries on their experiences with the Se.Plan tool while hands-on training was also provided to the participants to provide future improvements to the tool. Representatives from Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Nepal, Indonesia, and Myanmar were present along with other international institutions such as the World Wildlife Fund, ASEAN Social Forestry, Mekong Basin River Commission, and the Asian Forest Cooperation Organization.
The Se.Plan was developed to improve strategic decision-making in the restoration of forests to support the UN Decade of Ecosystems, the UN Decade of Forests, and UN SDG 15 on halting and reversing land degradation which is also in line with the Kunming Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. It is a mapping tool which provides versatility and cloud-computing capability on balancing benefits, costs and constraints layers in generating the most suitable areas for forest restoration efforts.
SePlan is a decision tool lodged under the SEPAL (System for Earth Observation Data Access, Processing and Analysis for Land Monitoring) Project, an open-access platform funded by the Government of Norway and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and part of the Open Foris. The developments of the SePlan tool were made in partnership with the UN FAO in close collaboration with Duke University, Spatial Informatics Group, Peking University, SilvaCarbon, and the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, and financial support from the Government of Japan. The skills and capacity building efforts and popularization of the Se.Plan tools are being led also by SERVIR SEA in partnership with the Regional Community Forestry Training Center for Asia and the Pacific (RECOFTC) specifically under the UN-REDD initiative on Climate Change Mitigation through Social Forestry in ASEAN countries while the event was jointly organized by SERVIR SEA, USAID, NASA and Asian Disaster Preparedness Center (ADPC), UN FAO and SilvaCarbon.