Open science and open data are increasingly important tools for addressing global challenges such as forest and climate change. The Forest Declaration, adopted in 2022 at the XV World Forestry Congress in Seoul, encourages wide uptake of technologies for the provision of and equitable access to accurate information on forests. Knowledge enables evidence-based decision making and drives positive forest and landscape changes. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) is working to promote the use of open science and open data in the forest sector. Over the last three years, FAO led the implementation of the ‘Building global capacity to increase transparency in the forest sector’ project (CBIT-Forest). The objective of the project was to strengthen institutional and technical capacities of developing countries in forest-related data collection, analysis, and dissemination processes, to meet the enhanced transparency requirements of the Paris Agreement on climate change.