The national forest monitoring system (NFMS) assessment tool has been developed under the project “Building global capacity to increase transparency in the forest sector (CBIT-Forest)” implemented by Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and funded by the Capacity-Building Initiative for Transparency (CBIT) trust fund of the Global Environment Facility (GEF). The tool aims to assist countries in carrying out a comprehensive capacity assessment of forest monitoring across three complementary themes – institutional arrangements, measurement and estimation, and reporting and verification. The tool is based on FAO’s Voluntary Guidelines on National Forest Monitoring (VGNFM) reinforced by the REDD compass of the Global Forest Observations Initiative (GFOI) and incorporating FAO’s extensive field experience of forest monitoring in different national contexts.