It introduces many issues that cut across other chapters in this report. This chapter has four main sections. In a given land area, a full carbon accounting system would consist of a complete accounting for changes in carbon stocks across all carbon pools in a given time period. In principle, applying full carbon accounting to all land in each country would yield the net carbon exchange between terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere. These guidelines include suggested definitions for many important terms and can form a starting point for reporting compliance with the Kyoto Protocol.
Definitions based solely on either land use or canopy cover have limitations for carbon accounting.
Land use, for example, may be defined in terms of administrative or cultural purposes and may bear little relation to the actual vegetation or amount of carbon on a site. Issues arise with respect to the timing, sequencing, and causes of these activities. However, some operational forestry definitions of reforestation include the regeneration of trees after harvesting. When such definitions of reforestation are used but the accompanying definition of deforestation does not include disturbance or harvesting, asymmetric accounting occurs. Under such definitions of reforestation, many forestry management practices would create large areas of lands under Article 3.3.