Introduction

Abstract

Wood resources are a long standing and important political issue. First established at local and then at national level, information about wood resources were collated at international level by FAO from 1948 onwards. The Rio Earth Summit in 1992 and the policy at European Union level stressed the requirement for the sustainable management of these wood resources. National Forest Inventories (NFIs) are the main source of information for describing and quantifying these wood resources. At European level NFIs worked on a harmonisation methodology to make data comparable. In this chapter the harmonisation process developed with the support of the COST Office is described. An important output of this COST Action is the provision by NFIs of country reports detailing their way of working in terms of calculating wood resources estimations. The content of the book is also briefly described in this first chapter, including the land coverage of the 40 countries that have provided a country report demonstrating the international reach of this publication.