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. Note: This dataset version contains corrected forestland removals (and associated carbon stock change data) for Italy, obtained by carrying forward 2020 values to the period 2025. The correction addresses data quality issues that characterized the Country submission to FAO of carbon stock data for 2025, which are currently unresolved. The corrected annual forestland removals for Italy in 2025 are about -22 Mt CO2, consistent with the previous decade, compared to annual emissions of 50 MtCO2 that had been estimated in the previous Zenodo version, based on the country data submitted to the FRA 2025. This country revision of over -70 MtCO2 propagates to all regional aggregates to which Italy belongs, i.e., Southern Europe, EU27, Europe, OECD and Annex I, generating stronger forestland removals by this amount compared to the previous version. New 2025 forestland removal estimates for Italy may be released in FAOSTAT in the future, and hence in Zenodo, pending an update by the country of its underlying carbon stock data for the year 2025. 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