Community's participation has been promoted as a way to empower local communities in REDD+ programs. A particular goal is that they would monitor forest change and measure carbon stocks, and thus reduce the costs of such assessments. More generically, the recent Paris Climate Agreement has further emphasized the need for transparency in reporting, the importance of the land use sector for both mitigation and adaptation, and the fact the targets can only be achieved through bottom-up engagement of multiple actors. So far, little empirical evidence shows that participatory measurement, reporting and verification (PMRV) is feasible. A series of multidisciplinary studies investigated the feasibility of local participation into MRV. The research was conducted in Indonesia, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Mexico, and China. We find that effective PMRV requires local communities' motivation. Motivation depends on people's knowledge, their interests, incentives, tenure, and the relevance of these monitoring activities to their other livelihood activities. Monitoring and reporting changes in forest cover, drivers of change, and carbon sequestration, are in general costly and require the capacity to monitor and report. Other sectors provide some relevant lessons and experiences on reporting from village to national levels. In Indonesia, for example, we learned that the health care system has simpler governance for monitoring and reporting compared to the forestry sector and has successfully been in place for more than 40 years. In contrast, the forestry sector failed in engaging local communities in the reporting of timber and non-timber forest products. Verification refers to assessing the accuracy, consistency and transparency of measurements to verify the attainment of emission reduction targets. We explain how verification can use a combination of remote sensing data, land use and land cover maps developed by/with villagers to identify gaps and points of disagreement, for which ground