The National Forest Monitoring System is a national MRV system, currently under development, aimed at improving the coordination and organisation amongst different institutions involved in the forestry sector in Costa Rica, in order to generate quality and verifiable information for different purposes.

The National Forest Monitoring System builds on Costa Rica’s Payment for Environmental Services (PES) monitoring system to support significant forest sector-related national policy objectives and/or programmes, including: (i) the national 2021 carbon neutrality goal; (ii) participation in the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) and efforts to access its funds; (iii) compliance with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change; and (iv) pursuit of the Verified Carbon Standard Jurisdictional and Nested REDD+ (VCS JNR) Framework for accounting and crediting REDD+ programmes.

A coordination mechanism is in place where a group of specialists have come together to identify and solve technical and information gaps, in order to complete and adjust this new overarching MRV system that caters to various different requirements and needs. A series of completed, on-going and planned actions are developed under this process.