The objective of KYOTO INV project 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 to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) commits its Parties to limit net emissions of six major greenhouse gases, with respect to a reference year (1990 for most of the signers). The Protocol is now in force (February 2005) and the signers countries are expected to reduce the emission within the 2008 – 2012 (commitment period).

As far as CO2 is concerned, the Protocol opens up for offsetting gas emission reduction by sequestration of carbon in carbon stocks. The Protocol explicitly accepts taking into account carbon sequestration related to afforestation and reforestation activities. At the same time it obliges taking into account reduction of the forest carbon stocks related to deforestation activities. Other forest activities and, more generally, activities related to land-use change in general can also be taken into account, but this is not mandatory.

As a consequence, 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 at the national level, 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.

ESA initiated in 2002 an activity on Treaty Enforcement Services using Earth Observation (TESEO). One of the four TESEO studies was dedicated to investigating the potential of EO to support, in the future, the implementation and enforcement of the Kyoto Protocol to the UNFCCC by providing geographic information related to carbon stocks. It aimed at identifying the potential users and collecting their needs and requirements, making a state-of-the-art of the relevant EO techniques, proposing a list of possible products, taking two of them further to prototypes and, finally, giving recommendations for future European EO missions and programmes.

Building upon the TESEO Carbon study, KYOTO-INV aimed to develop an operational Service that would support the national bodies in charge of reporting on Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry activities during the first commitment period 2008-2012. To this extent, more than 200.000 Km2 were covered during the project and for three different dates. The processing years are 1990 (reference year), 1997 (1984 for NL) and 2002 . The products for the two last years are for demonstrating and benchmarking the service, whilst the 1990 products will be the reference for the service during the Commitment period.

The project has been organized in two phases, and involved several End Users.

Phase I, completed in June 2004, was aimed to produce service development and implementation specification and implement prototypes on five different countries (Italy, Switzerland, Netherlands, Norway and Finland). The Users were directly involved within all project activities and in particular in participating and contributing to the Prototypes assessment. Prototypes were implemented on ten geographically restricted test sites (about 2500 km2 each), two for each user, and for three different dates.

Phase II, started in October 2004, and a new user, Ministerio de Medio Ambiente (Spanish Ministry of Environment) joined the core user group. Phase II aimed to develop, validate and assess the service on a national scale for Italy, Switzerland, Netherlands and Spain. Around 82500 km2 of Italy and 45000 km2 of Spain were covered, while both Switzerland and the Netherlands were covered wall-to-wall.

The service definition was refined upon Phase I assessment in cooperation with the Users and they expressed their commitment to continue the project. The academic partner (University of Trento) performed a scientific assesment of the prototypes and the methodology was refined accordingly. Upon these results, a Service Level Agreements was signed between each of the Users and their Service Provider for regulating their mutual expectations on the Service Level during the entire Phase II. Each SLA will be re-issued at the end of the project for covering the successive period. In Phase II a particular attention has been given to quality assurance activities, in order to ensure a sound validation and reliable results. The Service Quality Assurance Plan, as issued during Phase I, has been tuned on each specific case and according to Ground Truth Data availability and quality specifications. For each service case the Quality Verification is carried out by a different partner than the Service Provider, in order to provide an independent assessment.

The processing started in the beginning of 2005 and a first check was performed on the first 30% of the targeted production. Validation and Assessment activities were done in cooperation with the users in order to anticipate and solve any potential problems. Upon acceptance from the Users the production continued on the remaining 70% of the targeted production.