"REDDiness is a development project built on an international partnership between state-of-the-art entities specialized in forest management and earth observation techniques that aims to assist Gabon and the Republic of Congo in establishing their national forest monitoring centres. With its foundations on existing EC, ESA, GMES and other international and regional projects on forest assessment, forest mapping and carbon trend estimation, the project will increase the readiness of these countries to join the carbon trade market and strengthen their capacity to negotiate potential carbon transactions. The partnership assistance will focus on transferring optimal robust spatial methods to enhance the monitoring of forest changes and enable the precise assessment of annual carbon emissions from deforestation and degradation. This will be achieved through a better operational use of existing methodologies and the introduction of innovative techniques to meet UNFCC technical requirements for measuring, reporting and verifying (MRV) forest changes and associated carbon emissions. The project’s overarching objective is to assist Gabon and the Republic of Congo to accurately report on the rate of deforestation which they committed to reduce from 0.19 down to 0.10% by 2017."