ABSTRACT
This chapter primarily addresses the costs of forest monitoring for carbon stock changes, as carried out by local communities in ground-level inventories. The question we ultimately seek to answer is whether community monitoring of carbon stock changes is cost-effective, taking into account the costs of training and the subsequent monitoring by communities with limited supervision. It is of course necessary also to evaluate whether the results of such community-based surveys are reliable, and this we test by statistical comparison between the results of community inventories and those of professional foresters and scientists at the same sites. The chapter concludes by describing other advantages of community monitoring, which may have profound implications for the long-term sustainability and cost-effectiveness of national REDD+ programmes.
