Land Use: the Kyoto protocol, the FAO definition of forest and the Italian Inventory of Forests and Carbon Stocks

In 2000, after the international agreement on the Kyoto Protocol of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the United Nation Food and Agriculture Organization decided to adopt a new set of basic forest and forest change definitions. The main change is that new definitions are no more related to land cover but to land use. The entry into force of the Kyoto Protocol requires now that national forest related data must be based on land use concept. Thus, national forest inventory shall be designed in order to collect data which are consistent with current land-use related definitions. In this paper the authors analyze the case of the Italian forest inventory.