Low latency Global Carbon Budget

The Low latency Global Carbon Budget 2023 was the first low latency budget. It covers January to December 2023 and was published in National Science Review on 22 October 2024. In 2023 the CO₂ growth rate reached a record 3.37 ± 0.11 ppm yr⁻¹ at Mauna Loa (2.82 ± 0.08 ppm yr⁻¹ for the marine boundary layer), 86% above 2022, while fossil CO₂ emissions increased by only 0.1–1.1%. Vegetation models and an OCO-2 inversion place the global net land sink at 0.44 ± 0.21 GtC yr⁻¹, the weakest since 2003. The largest abnormal loss was in the Amazon during the drought of the second half of 2023, with a further loss in Southeast Asia and extreme fire emissions in Canada.

Maps of net land and ocean CO2 flux anomalies in 2023, for the whole year and each quarter, from bottom-up models and the OCO-2 inversion — Net land and ocean CO₂ flux anomalies in 2023, for the whole year and each quarter, relative to the 2015–2022 average: bottom-up models (left) and the OCO-2 inversion (right). Positive values mean more CO₂ taken up from the atmosphere by the land or the ocean. Figure 2 in Ke, P., Ciais, P., Sitch, S., et al. (2024), National Science Review, 11(12), nwae367. CC BY 4.0.

Key results

View the key results

Publication

Ke, P., Ciais, P., Sitch, S., Li, W., Bastos, A., Liu, Z., et al. (2024). Low latency carbon budget analysis reveals a large decline of the land carbon sink in 2023. National Science Review, 11(12), nwae367. https://doi.org/10.1093/nsr/nwae367