An operational system to quantify carbon stocks and stock changes at regional and national scales will be absolutely mandatory to allow Europe to fulfill its commitment to implement the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and Kyoto Protocol (KP). This includes establishing a ”national system for the estimation of anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks ...” by 2007 (see Article 5.1 of the Protocol), monitoring and strengthening the source-sink function of forests, while preserving the associated political, social and economic interests.

This provides considerable motivation for an independent European capability for a broad assessment of carbon “sinks”. Currently, consistent Pan European inventories of land use, land use change and forestry (LULUCF) relevant to the UNFCCC and the KP are essentially lacking. The Ministerial Conference for the Protection of Forests in Europe set up six criteria for sustainable forest management.

Under Criterion 1 “Maintenance and Appropriate Enhancement of Forest Resources and their Contribution to Global Carbon Cycles” the concept area “carbon balance” including the quantitative indicator 1.3 “Total carbon storage and changes of the storage in forest stands” has been specified. Therefore CARBO-INVENT provides methodologies for combining different data sources towards an improved estimate of forest carbon stocks and stock changes at the national and European level, for the purposes of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and the proper implementation of the KP Articles on LULUCF.