An improved approach to estimate the natural land carbon sink

O’Sullivan, M., Friedlingstein, P., Sitch, S., Pongratz, J., Schwingshackl, C., Gasser, T. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4882-2647, Ciais, P., Arora, V., Kato, E., Knauer, J., Monier, E., Nützel, T., Sun, Q., Yuan, W., Yue, X., & Zaehle, S. (2026). An improved approach to estimate the natural land carbon sink. npj Climate and Atmospheric Science 9 (1) e29. 10.1038/s41612-025-01302-7.

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Abstract

The natural land carbon sink (SLAND) absorbs roughly 25–30% of anthropogenic CO2 emissions, thus playing a critical role in offsetting climate warming. In the Global Carbon Budget (GCB), SLAND is estimated using model simulations that isolate the carbon response of land to environmental changes (i.e. rising atmospheric CO2, nitrogen deposition, and changes in climate). However, these simulations assume fixed pre-industrial land cover, failing to represent today’s human-altered landscapes. This leads to a systematic overestimation of forest area, and thus CO2 sink strength, in regions heavily altered by human activity. We present a new process-based approach to estimate SLAND using Dynamic Global Vegetation Models. Our corrected estimate reduces SLAND by ~20% (0.6 PgC yr-1) over 2015–2024, from 3.00 ± 0.94 to 2.42 ± 0.77 PgC yr-1. We incorporate this new SLAND estimate with emissions from land-use change from bookkeeping models, to estimate a net land sink of 1.19 ± 1.04 PgC yr-1, which aligns closely with atmospheric inversion constraints. This downward revision of SLAND reduces the magnitude of the budget imbalance for 2015–2024, indicating a more consistent partitioning of the global carbon budget.

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