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Dryad

Canada’s extreme wildfires dominate the decline in global land carbon sinks in 2023

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Jun 11, 2024 version files 514.48 MB

Abstract

Terrestrial land carbon sinks are strongly influenced by climate extremes, and 2023 is the warmest year on record, accompanied by an El Niño event, extreme wildfires, and extreme precipitation and drought, but their impact on global land sinks in 2023 remains unclear. Here, we used the Global Carbon Assimilation System, version 2, to estimate recent global land sinks by assimilating the OCO-2 ACOS v11.1 XCO2 retrievals. We estimate the global land sink to be -1.63 ± 0.52 PgC/yr in 2023. Compared to 2017-2022, it decreases by 0.59 PgC/yr, in which net ecosystem exchange decreases by only 0.14 PgC/yr, but wildfire emissions increase significantly by 0.45 PgC/yr, mainly in Canada. Our findings suggest that extreme wildfires are an important threat to land sinks under global warming.