On December 10th 2020 GMV NSL held the first MRV4C remote demonstration meeting with key actors in the cocoa agroforestry sector of the Dominican Republic. The meeting’s remit was to report on progress and demonstrate the MRV4C Web Platform developments.

MRV4C ("A Monitoring, Measurement, Reporting and Verification System for Cocoa sector in the Dominican Republic”) is a European Space Agency-funded project addressing activity line 6 "Earth Observations (EO) for Sustainable Development. MRV4C aims to enhance the use of EO and EO-based tools for supporting sustainable management and decision-making in the cocoa agroforestry sector, as well as to support REDD+ (Reducing Emission from Deforestation and forest Degradation) activities in the country.

The Demonstration was organized online, because of the COVID-19 travel ban. Numerous stakeholders participated, including several representatives from the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources and the Ministry of Agriculture of the Dominican Republic, the World Bank, and from Climate Focus.

The event opened with speeches by Dr. Elsa Carla De Grandi, the EO project manager, and Dr. Ana Sebastián- López, EO Business Development Manager, outlining the project’s progress. The EO -based products presented consisted of a land suitability map for cocoa agroforestry, a product to identify drought and a forest/non forest mask generated over the Dominican Republic. The products were generated by combining more traditional modelling approaches with machine learning techniques.

The presentations were followed by the MRV4C Web Platform demonstration. The EO-based products were showcased to the stakeholders through the platform and the MRV4C tool. Several functionalities were demonstrated: datasets upload, EO-based products visualization, product query, statistical information generation and generation of summary graphs - in some cases for the whole country. In the following months the stakeholders will have the chance to access and evaluate the products available on the platform and provide feedback on these through tailored questionnaires.

The stakeholders gave the results, even if not yet final, their thumbs-up, and proposed a presentation of the project to the National Cocoa Commission. During the next months GMV NSL will finalize other products of interest to the Dominican government and private sector, such as the classification of cocoa agroforestry. With this product portfolio and MRV4C tool, GMV NSL aims to support the development of a sector, cocoa agroforestry, that is underpinning the economy of the country, while also contributing towards the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), specifically, SDGs 1, 2, 8 and 13: “No-Poverty”, “Zero Hunger”, “Decent work and Economic growth” and “Climate Action”.