Carbon dioxide removals by tropical moist forests offset most land-use emissions across 18 Afrotropical countries

African tropical moist forests are critical regulators of global carbon cycling, yet their contributions to national carbon budgets remain poorly constrained, impairing effective policy design. Here, we unravel carbon removals and emissions for 18 African tropical countries using multiple approaches over a data-rich period (2015–2019). Across countries, carbon removals (−286 ± 68.4 TgC yr−1) nearly offset land-use change emissions (343.4 ± 100.3 TgC yr−1), with consistent net fluxes between bottom-up and top-down approaches (57.4 ± 121.4 TgC yr−1 versus 99.1 ± 164.5 TgC yr−1). Results vary between countries, with highest removals in intact forests in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (−81.7 ± 64.2 TgC yr−1), lowest land-use change emissions in Gabon (2.6 ± 7.1 TgC yr−1), and highest fossil fuel emissions in Nigeria (31.2 ± 1.6 TgC yr−1). African tropical countries show high carbon removal rates and land-use change emissions but low fossil fuel emissions, contrasting with industrialized countries. (Inter)nationally endorsed conservation policies can reverse national carbon budgets from net sources to sinks. Carbon removals by intact African tropical moist forests nearly offset land-use emissions, underscoring the importance of environmental policies to protect this critical carbon sink, based on synthesized field data, remote-sensing products, and carbon-flux modelling.