By Daniel Murdiyarso, Margaret Skutsch, Manuel Guariguata, Markku Kanninen, Cecilia Luttrell, Pita Verweij and Osvaldo Stella

Key points

• Including forest degradation (along with deforestation) in a REDD agreement will make it more effective in accounting for carbon emissions and more equitable by encouraging additional countries to participate.
• Degradation should be viewed as a different process from deforestation with different actors and drivers.
• Changes in carbon stocks from forest degradation can be monitored using the ‘stock-difference’ and ‘gain-loss’ methods. The choice of method will depend largely on countries’ data availability and capacity.
• The stock-difference method allows local communities and forest users to monitor the carbon stock changes of their own forest activities; the gain-loss method is primarily intended to use secondary data already available at national level.
• The inclusion of degradation in a REDD agreement should permit flexibility in the development and application of methodologies, allowing countries to build on their existing capacities and circumstances.

The review can be downloaded from CIFOR's website.