* Correspondence: gillian.petrokofsky@plants.ox.ac.uk 1 Department of Plant Sciences, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX13RB, UK Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
Annual emissions from deforestation in Indonesia and Brazil equal four-fifths of the annual reduction target of the Kyoto Protocol [4]. Linking deforestation with climate change as a mitigation action was one of the key decisions of the thirteenth Conference of the Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The Bali Action Plan agreed: “Enhanced national/international action on mitigation of climate change, including, inter alia, consideration of. . .policy approaches and positive incentives on issues relating to reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries; and the role
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Petrokofsky et al. Environmental Evidence 2012, 1:6 http://www.environmentalevidencejournal.org/content/1/1/6
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of conservation, sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks in developing countries” [5]. These actions are now referred to collectively as REDD+ . Under the UNFCCC, the REDD+ instrument (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), as agreed at the COP-16 of the UNFCCC in December 2010 [6], is critical for developing countries. REDD+ includes the implementation of the following mitigation actions: (a) Reducing emissions from deforestation; (b)Reducing emissions from forest degradation; (c) Conservation of forest carbon stocks; (d)Sustainable management of forest; and (e) Enhancement of forest carbon stocks. This means that, potentially, all forest resources in developing countries are subject to accountable mitigation actions. The Cancun agreement also stipulates that robust and transparent national monitoring systems of the above mitigation activities shall be developed. As a consequence, for the implementation of REDD+, it is crucial to determine the spatio-temporal variation of carbon stocks. Obtaining field measurements and developing estimation models to do so is an expensive and time-consuming task. This systematic review will compare methods of measuring carbon stocks and carbon stock changes in key carbon pools and land use categories/activities identified by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the UNFCCCa. Figure 1 illustrates these carbon pools and shows the main fluxes of the global carbon balance that are covered in this systematic review. The systematic review is not designed to provide technical guidance, such as those outlined in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Good Practice Guidance and Guidelines [7,8], or to be a sourcebook of methods, such as GOFC-GOLD [9], but is aimed at providing an exhaustive comparative literature review in this field, including the provision of published data on uncertainties.

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