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Analysing sustainable forestry at a national level involves many stakeholder groups and multiple resources; thus, analyses tend to be complicated. To evaluate the consequences of different policy options, scenario analyses often are carried out to assess effects in terms of what goods and services can be obtained from forests. This article concerns the provision of input data to such studies. Owing to the complexity of the analyses and the rapid development in the area of forest inventory methodology it is not straightforward to decide how input data should be acquired. This article provides a framework for how analyses of this type can be addressed as well as a case example to illustrate how different data acquisition methods may be evaluated. The framework comprises two steps: the first is to identify the demand of data connected to the resources included in the analysis; the second step is characterizing the quality of inventory data provided by the data acquisition strategy. As an example, three data acquisition strategies were evaluated; none of them was found to be optimal from all points of views and thus the study concludes with a presentation of an integrated method for data acquisition that is based on data from sampled landscape patches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropogenic carbon dioxide balancing can be evaluated by counting the amount of emissions and the sinks that absorb and release carbon. Local level planning can affect the emission-sinks balance. However when trying to meet international goals, it seems that local government mainly considers emission reduction and not sink losses. This paper investigates the implications of using carbon dioxide emissions and forest ecosystems as sinks in Swedish municipal planning. The results demonstrate how emission reduction can be offset by the losses in sinks derived by land use and transportation planning. This moves local government further away from achieving the national emission reduction goal. The results also show a potential for carbon trading between municipalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]