The objective of the Kyoto Inventory project (KYOTO-INV) was to define and implement a nation-wide service of benefit to actors involved in the reporting for the Kyoto Protocol or in trading resulting from the Protocol. The service included provision of monitoring with respect to Afforestation Reforestation and Deforestation (ARD) activities, or more generally land-use change activities.

The Kyoto Protocol encourages activities that result in an increase of the terrestrial carbon stock, and it requires reporting of these changes in the carbon stock based on appropriate measurements and estimations. As a result, there is a need for services that can provide nation-wide monitoring of ARD and other land-use-change activities and reliable estimates of the resulting changes in the carbon stock.

KYOTO-INV developed an operational service supporting the national bodies in charge of reporting on Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry activities during the first commitment period 2008-2012. The service was delivered to the mandated Ministry or Government Agency in respectively Italy, Switzerland, Netherlands, Norway, Finland and Spain, covering more than 200.000 km² for three different dates. The processing years were 1990 (reference year), 1997 (1984 for NL) and 2002 .

Phase I of the project (2002 - 2004) developed the service and implemented prototypes in IT, CH, NL, NO and FI. Prototypes were implemented on ten geographically restricted test sites (about 2500 km² each).

Phase II (2004 - 2005) integrated a new user, the Spanish Ministry of Environment, in the core user group, and developed, validated and assessed the service on a national scale for IT, CH, NL and ES. Around 82500 km² of Italy and 45000 km² of Spain were covered, while both Switzerland and the Netherlands were entirely covered (wall-to-wall).

Most activities of the project were thereafter integrated into the GMES Forest Monitoring project (ESA GSE programme).