Aristides Muhate has 17 years of experience in the forest sector both with the Government and private sector. He started his career in 2004 as a technician in the Forest Department at the National Directorate of Forest and Wildlife, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development. He also served as the Head of Department of Forest and Wildlife at the Forestry Services in Nampula. In 2008 he joined the Private sector working on issues related with Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation. Aristides is one of the REDD+ mechanism pioneers in Mozambique with a lot of experience on implementation of REDD+ projects in rural areas. He lived for 6 years in Cheringoma, Marromeu and Gorongosa Districts, where he was responsible for organizing and legalizing communities to be eligible for REDD+ project. As part of his work on these 3 districts, he introduced and disseminated agroforest technologies for more than 3,000 farmers, led the development and implementation of monitoring systems and QA/QC procedures for carbon accounting and carbon management, and managed project operations in Cheringoma and Nhambita Projects. In 2014 Aristides re-joined the Government (MICOA) as a technical assistant for REDD+ projects in Maputo. By that time, Aristides started to support the development of the first jurisdictional REDD+ project (under the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility) in 9 districts of the Zambezia Province. In 2016, Aristides set up the first MRV unit within the National Sustainable Development Fund (Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development) where he is now the coordinator. Aristides led the 4th National Forest inventory (first ever led by a Mozambican), the production of the historical deforestation data, the development of the 2016 Land Use Land Cover map, the development of the Forest Reference Emission Level (FREL) for Mozambique, and the production of annual deforestation and emissions data for Mozambique. Aristides holds master’s in engineering management by the University of Pretoria and an Honors degree in forest engineering by the University of Eduardo Mondlane. His passion is Data Science Quality management and systems thinking.