An overview of guidelines and issues for the monitoring, evaluation, reporting, verification, and certification of forestry projects for climate change mitigation

Monitoring and evaluation of forestry projects is needed to accurately determine their impact on greenhouse gas emissions and other attributes, and to ensure that the global climate is protected and that country obligations are met. We present an overview of guidelines recently developed for the monitoring, evaluation, reporting, verification, and certification of forestry projects for climate change mitigation. These guidelines are targeted to developers, evaluators, verifiers, and certifiers of forestry projects, and address several key issues, including methods for estimating gross and net carbon savings. The next phase of our work will be to develop a procedural handbook providing information on how one can complete monitoring, evaluation and verification forms. We then plan to test the usefulness of these handbooks in the real world.