Land system change has major consequences for climate change, biodiversity and ecosystem services, and is central to the debate of sustainable development. Land policies aimed at guiding land system towards sustainable pathways need to be informed by better understanding of land system change, and often rely on the forecasting of future land system change. For example, initiatives of Reducing E...

There have been many calls for community participation in MRV (measuring, reporting, verification) for REDD+. This paper examines whether community involvement in MRV is a requirement, why it appears desirable to REDD+ agencies and external actors, and under what conditions communities might be interested in participating. It asks What's in it for communities? What might communities gain from s...

Participatory Measurement, Reporting and Verification (PMRV), in the context of reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation with its co-benefits (REDD+) requires sustained monitoring and reporting by community members. This requirement appears challenging and has yet to be achieved. Other successful, long established, community self-monitoring and reporting systems may provide ...

REDD (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) constitutes a set of financial incentives designed to reduce CO2 emissions from forest degradation and deforestation. REDD success depends on measuring forest biomass as a proxy for CO2 stocks. We tested the efficacy of airborne Xand P-band interferometry as a remote-sensing method to quantify forest biomass and detect changes i...

Biodiversity conservation is a required co-benefit of REDD+. Biodiversity monitoring is therefore needed, yet in most areas it will be constrained by limitations in the available human professional and financial resources. REDD+ programs that use forest plots for biomass monitoring may be able to take advantage of the same data for detecting changes in the tree diversity, using the richness and...

Disturbances that lead to forest degradation have been estimated to affect roughly 100 million hectares (ha) of forest globally per year (FAO, 2006, in Nabuurs et al., 2007). With respect to mitigation of climate change, forest degradation refers to a loss of carbon stock within forests that remain forests (IPCC, 2003a; UNFCCC, 2008). Degradation, therefore, implies that measured forest variabl...

BACKGROUND Historic carbon emissions are an important foundation for proposed efforts to Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation and enhance forest carbon stocks through conservation and sustainable forest management (REDD+). The level of uncertainty in historic carbon emissions estimates is also critical for REDD+, since high uncertainties could limit climate benefits from c...