FAO net Forest Emissions/removals 1990-2025 FINAL ESSD Paper

The FAOSTAT database on forest emissions/removals disseminates FAO estimates and publicly available UNFCCC country data. The FAO estimates were originally developed by Federici et al. (2015) and Tubiello et al. (2021). They are based on a carbon stock change approach (IPCC, 2019), using as input country data on forest area and carbon stock collected by FAO via the FAO Forest Resources Assessment (FAO, 2025a). The FRA 2025 data used as input included: i. Forest area and its two components: Naturally Regenerating Forest area and Planted Forest area; and ii. Forest Carbon Stock and Forest Carbon Density for the following carbon pools: above-ground biomass; below-ground living biomass; litter; dead wood; and soil carbon. The UNFCCC data were collected from available submissions to the UNFCCC, including i. Forest Land area and, where available, Managed Forest Land area; ii. Deforestation area; iii. Emissions/removals on Forest Land; and iv. Emissions from deforestation. The FAO dataset cover the period 1990-2025 for 194 countries and 42 territories, including 22 sub-regions, 5 continents and 8 special aggregates, including UNFCCC Annex and non-Annex I, OECD, least-developed countries, small island developing states. The FAO dataset further includes available country data submitted to the UNFCCC, with nearly 9000 data points for a combined total of 137 countries over the period 1990-2023. References FAO, 2025a: Global Forest Resources Assessment 2025. Rome. Available at: https://doi.org/10.4060/cd6709en. Federici, S., Tubiello, F. N., Salvatore, M., Jacobs, H. and Schmidhuber, J., 2015. New estimates of CO2 forest emissions and removals: 1990-2015. Forest Ecol Manag. 352:89-98. 10.1016/j.foreco.2015.04.022 IPCC: 2019 Refinement to the 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories, edited by: Calvo Buendia, E., Tanabe, K., Kranjc, A., Baasansuren, J., Fukuda, M., Ngarize, S., Osako, A., Pyrozhenko, Y., Shermanau, P., and Federici, S., IPCC, Switzerland, 2019. Tubiello, F. N., Conchedda, G., Wanner, N., Federici, S., Rossi, S., and Grassi, G.: Carbon emissions and removals from forests: new estimates, 1990–2020, Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 13, 1681–1691, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-13-1681-2021, 2021