The lack of country and region specific data poses a serious limitation to converting area estimates of deforestation and forest degradation to carbon stock change estimates for most tropical countries. Thus we cannot make accurate and precise estimates of emissions and removals in national REDD+ programmes and REDD+ demonstration activities.

Progress on building the institutional capacity of countries to conduct forest inventories and other measurements for improving greenhouse gas inventories in forestry and other land use sectors has been slow in most non-Annex I countries.