Forest cover: setting targets for the future

The International Year of Forests, declared by the UN, is a good occasion to discuss the steps leading to a treaty on policy approaches that are needed to reduce forest degradation in developing countries. The first step is perhaps to build consensus about strategies ensuring sustainable management of forests and enhancement of forest carbon stocks (aka REDD+ strategies). Such consensus is an essential precondition for inclusion of a REDD+ mechanism in a post-2012 climate change agreement: REDD+ could contribute to the mitigation of climate change only if various methodological issues are resolved [1].A key issue at the moment is how to set country-specific reference levels (RLs) -- that is, the levels below which the countries' reduced emissions could be measured and credited - "if the methodology for setting RL is not carefully designed it will lead to non additional emission reductions and potentially to an inflated supply of REDD credits" [2]. The articles collected in Thematic Forest Series form a diversity of ideas which is essential for developing a set of options from which REDD+ countries may choose. This editorial calls attention to the use of Land-Use/Land-Cover Change models.The methods for setting country-specific RLs should be both politically and scientifically relevant. Hence, we should agree about the indicators of relevance. Huettner, Leemans, Kok and Ebeling [3] conducted an expert survey to reveal the most important indicators. They asked experts to evaluate the importance of 17 indicators. Here are the five indicators that received the highest scores:1. Compatibility with existing IPCC Good Practice Guidelines2. Dynamic updating3. Clarity to policy makers4. High validation accuracy5. Encouragement of early actionAt first glance it looks reasonable to give a high priority to such indicator as 'clarity to policymakers', but going to details we see that this discourages the usage of scientifically advanced methods. The advanced methods for setting