World Resources Institute, ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability, and several partners are equipping community leaders with the tools they need to plan for and monitor locally-led nature-based solutions and equitable programs for climate change mitigation. Cities, counties, municipalities and landowners are taking proactive steps to mitigate climate change, but to do so they need reliable and consistent information on the greenhouse gas (GHG) impacts of land management decisions.

The LEARN (Land Emissions and Removals Navigator) tool is a free web tool which provides automated spatial analysis of the GHG impacts of forests and trees within a community or area of interest. LEARN enables communities and land managers to make data-driven plans for forests and trees and efficiently monitor the implementation and impacts over time. Insights from the LEARN tool can be used to highlight how local climate action contributes to state and national mitigation targets and inform local decision making. The tool analyzes national datasets from the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Geological Survey to derive spatially explicit estimates of carbon emissions and removals from land cover change, forest disturbances, and changes to tree canopy on non-forest lands. The LEARN tool works in complement with ICLEI's U.S. Community Protocol’s Appendix J: Forests and Trees to support communities in forest- and tree-related climate action planning at the local scale.

This technical note documents the data and methods used in the LEARN tool and outlines opportunities for scaling and improvement.

Launch LEARN Tool (ICLEI)