The decline in tropical land carbon sink drove high atmospheric CO2 growth rate in 2023.

Abstract

Atmospheric CO₂ growth rate (CGR), reflecting the carbon balance between anthropogenic emissions and net uptake from land and ocean, largely determines the magnitude and speed of global warming. The CGR at Mauna Loa Baseline Observatory reached a record high in 2023. We quantified major components of the global carbon balance for 2023, by developing a framework that integrated fossil fuel CO₂ emissions data and an atmospheric inversion from the Global ObservatioN-based system for monitoring Greenhouse GAses (GONGGA) with two artificial intelligence (AI) models derived from dynamic global vegetation models. We attributed the record high CGR increase in 2023 compared to 2022 primarily to the large decline in land carbon sink (1803 ± 197 TgC year^-1), with minor contributions from a small reduction in ocean carbon sink (184 TgC year^-1) and a slight increase in fossil fuel emissions (24 TgC year^-1). At least 78% of the global decline in land carbon sink was contributed by the decline in tropical sink, with GONGGA inversion (1354 TgC year^-1) and AI simulations (1578 ± 666 TgC year^-1) showing similar declines in the tropics. We further linked this tropical decline to the detrimental impact of El Niño-induced anomalous warming and drying on vegetation productivity in water-limited Sahel and southern Africa. Our successful attribution of CGR increase within a framework combining atmospheric inversion and AI simulations enabled near-real-time tracking of the global carbon budget, which had a one-year reporting lag.