Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
UN specialized agency founded 1945, headquartered in Rome. Mandated to achieve food security and sustainable agriculture for 194 member states. Operates SEPAL (cloud-based EO processing for national forest monitoring), hosts the Open Foris open-source suite, and conducts the Global Forest Resources Assessment every five years as the sole global authority on forest statistics.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is a UN specialised agency founded on 16 October 1945 in Quebec City, Canada, and headquartered in Rome, Italy. It operates across 130+ countries with 194 member states and is governed by a biennial Conference and a 49-member Council. Director-General Qu Dongyu (China) has led the organisation since 2019.
In Earth observation, FAO functions as a major data user, tooling provider, and methodology authority. It neither operates satellites nor owns data distribution infrastructure; rather, it builds open-source analysis platforms and assessment methodologies that leverage data from Landsat, Sentinel-2, and other open archives through providers such as Google Earth Engine, ESA, and NASA.
The Open Foris initiative, offered by FAO as a digital public good, comprises ten open-source tools for forest and land monitoring. SEPAL (System for Earth Observation Data Access, Processing and Analysis for Land Monitoring), the flagship cloud platform, provides countries with access to satellite data archives and high-performance processing for national forest monitoring systems and UNFCCC climate reporting. SEPAL Phase 1 (2016-2021) was financed by Norway's International Climate and Forest Initiative; Phase 2, Forest and Land Monitoring for Climate Action, is ongoing. Collect Earth provides plot-level visual interpretation of Landsat and Sentinel imagery, supporting national greenhouse gas inventories in IPCC-compliant workflows. Earth Map, developed with Google, enables time-series analysis of vegetation, climate, and land-cover change without specialised software. WHISP (What's in that Plot?) applies a Convergence of Evidence methodology across global deforestation and commodity datasets to support supply-chain transparency, including EUDR compliance workflows.
FAO's Forestry Division leads the Global Forest Resources Assessment (FRA), a periodic five-yearly global forest inventory that uses Collect Earth and other Open Foris tools for remote sensing validation of country-reported data. The FRA standard is catalogued as fao-fra. FAO was a founding co-lead of GEOGLAM (launched 2011, G20 Cannes Summit); operational management sits with the Group on Earth Observations community structure and FAO participates as a contributing partner.
FAO's Geospatial Programme, with more than 50 years of activity, covers land cover mapping, agro-ecological zoning (GAEZ), land degradation monitoring, and emergency agricultural response. Open Foris solutions have been used in 91% of forest submissions from 65 countries to the UNFCCC since 2014. Sentinel-2 integration in SEPAL confirms a Copernicus data dependency; a formal FAO-Copernicus collaboration agreement has been reported but the specific agreement document was not accessible from tier-1 sources as of 2026-05-24.