Land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF) sector is the only sector in National green house gas (GHG) Inventory that accounts for carbon (C) removals, therefore its importance for reaching the long-term climate mitigation objectives has been widely recognized. Recently, an issue of uncertainty of the LULUCF sector estimates has been strongly emphasized and the scientific community is facing a growing need to facilitate national reporting regarding C emissions/removals under LULUCF sector.
National level estimates often require long-term and comprehensive datasets at a national scale, such as national forest inventories (NFI), but these data are not always available. To overcome this gap, multi-source data integration, remote-sensing and modelling approaches have been frequently applied, but all these methods carry many issues.
This session invites contributions on national and subnational carbon budget estimates (past, present and future) in different land uses (forests, crops, grasslands, urban areas) using multiple data sources and different calculation methods. NFI-based, remote sensing and modelling studies on C stocks and/or fluxes in different ecosystem pools (live biomass, dead organic matter or soil) are encouraged.
The aim is to provide an extensive overview of different methodological approaches that can be used for national scale estimates and highlight main issues regarding data integration, uncertainty assessment and model calibration and validation process.