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Background
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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.
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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.
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