The decline in tropical land carbon sink drives 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. CGR at Mauna Loa Baseline Observatory reached record high in 2023. Here we quantified major components of global carbon balance for 2023, by developing a framework which integrated fossil fuel CO2 emissions data, an atmospheric inversion from 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 the framework combining atmospheric inversion with AI simulations enabled near-real-time tracking of the global carbon budget which had a one-year reporting lag.