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  • Review Article
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Impacts of rising atmospheric dryness on terrestrial ecosystem carbon cycle

Nature Reviews Earth & Environment (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

Rising atmospheric dryness is affecting the terrestrial ecosystem carbon cycle through its influence on plant physiology. In this Review, we synthesize historical and projected trends in atmospheric vapour pressure deficit (VPD), a proxy for atmospheric dryness, and the mechanisms by which it affects the terrestrial carbon cycle. Since the late 1990s, global mean VPD has increased at a mean rate of 0.0155 ± 0.0041 hPa yr−1. VPD-driven reductions in leaf area index (0.11 ± 0.07 m2 m−2 hPa−1, 1982–2015), gross primary production (13.82 ± 3.12 PgC hPa−1, 1982–2015), light use efficiency (0.04 ± 0.02 gC MJ−1 hPa−1, 2001–2020) and net ecosystem production (5.59 ± 1.15 PgC hPa−1, 1982–2013) have been observed globally. However, attributing changes in the terrestrial carbon cycle to VPD is still challenging, owing to the confounding influence of other environmental factors, such as soil moisture, temperature and radiation. The mechanisms underlying plant responses to VPD — which include stomatal closure, hydraulic failure, abscisic acid biosynthesis, and cascading effects on fires and soil moisture deficits — are also poorly constrained, limiting the predictive capabilities of terrestrial carbon cycle models. Future research should prioritize establishing global VPD-manipulation experiments to enhance understanding of feedbacks between VPD, plants and the carbon cycle, and these mechanisms should then be integrated into terrestrial carbon cycle models.

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Fig. 1: Historical changes in vapour pressure deficit across terrestrial ecosystems.
Fig. 2: Sensitivity of terrestrial carbon cycling to rising atmosphere dryness.
Fig. 3: Thresholds of VPD influence on terrestrial ecosystem carbon cycling.
Fig. 4: The impacts of atmosphere dryness on terrestrial carbon cycle.
Fig. 5: Projected changes in global VPD between 2015–2100.

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Data availability

All the data that support the findings are openly available. The air temperature and AVP from the Climate Research Unit are available at https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/hrg/. The annual precipitation and potential evapotranspiration from the TerraClimate data are obtained from https://climate.northwestknowledge.net/TERRACLIMATE/index_directDownloads.php. The leaf area index and gross primary production from the Global Land Surface Satellite (GLASS) are available at https://www.glass.hku.hk/. The NEP from the Trendy data is obtained from https://globalcarbonbudgetdata.org/. The global land cover change dataset is available at https://gee-community-catalog.org/projects/glc_fcs/. The eddy covariance observations from FLUXNET2015 are available at https://fluxnet.org/data/fluxnet2015-dataset/. The CMIP6 dataset is available at https://esgf-node.llnl.gov/search/cmip6/.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42471326, 42141020; 41971275), the National Key R&D Program of China (No. 2024YFF1306600) and the Science and Technology Program of Guangdong (No. 2024B1212070012) for financial support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Carbon Neutrality, Sino-French Institute for Earth System Science, College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Wenping Yuan, Yin Wang, Miao Huang, Menglong Liu, Shilong Piao & Yao Zhang

  2. Guangdong Province Data Center of Terrestrial and Marine Ecosystems Carbon Cycle, School of Atmospheric Sciences, Sun Yat-sen University, Zhuhai, China

    Jie Tian, Mei Wang, Meimei Xue, Chaoqing Song & Xiuzhi Chen

  3. Department of Land Surveying and Geo-Informatics, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China

    Shuo Wang & Yamin Qing

  4. South China Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guangzhou, China

    Wenfang Xu

  5. Key Laboratory of Ecosystem Network Observation and Modeling, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Zheng Fu

  6. Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement, LSCE/IPSL, CEA-CNRS-UVSQ, Université Paris-Saclay, Gif-sur-Yvette, France

    Zheng Fu

  7. Natural Resources Canada, Canadian Forest Service, Laurentian Forestry Centre, Quebec City, Quebec, Canada

    Martin P. Girardin

  8. Department of Environmental Science, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Julia K. Green

  9. Institute of Land Surface Systems and Sustainable Development, Faculty of Geographical Science, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China

    Sha Zhou

  10. Ottawa Research and Development Centre, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

    Jiali Shang

  11. State Key Laboratory of Earth Surface Processes and Resource Ecology, College of Global Change and Earth System Science, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China

    Bin He

  12. Department of Geography, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Beijing Normal University, Zhuhai, China

    Haibo Lu

  13. State Key Laboratory of Urban and Regional Ecology, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Yongxian Su

  14. Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics, University of Minnesota, Saint Paul, MN, USA

    Walid Sadok

Authors
  1. Wenping Yuan
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  2. Jie Tian
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  3. Mei Wang
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  4. Shuo Wang
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  5. Wenfang Xu
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  6. Yin Wang
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  7. Zheng Fu
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  8. Martin P. Girardin
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  9. Julia K. Green
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  10. Sha Zhou
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  11. Jiali Shang
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  12. Bin He
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  13. Miao Huang
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  14. Menglong Liu
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  15. Haibo Lu
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  16. Shilong Piao
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  17. Yamin Qing
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  18. Meimei Xue
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  19. Chaoqing Song
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  20. Yongxian Su
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  21. Walid Sadok
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  22. Yao Zhang
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  23. Xiuzhi Chen
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Contributions

W.Y. and X.C. designed the manuscript. J.T., M.W., S.W. and W.X. researched data for the article. All authors reviewed and edited the manuscript before submission.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Wenping Yuan or Xiuzhi Chen.

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Nature Reviews Earth & Environment thanks Flurin Babst, Yanlan Liu and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Yuan, W., Tian, J., Wang, M. et al. Impacts of rising atmospheric dryness on terrestrial ecosystem carbon cycle. Nat Rev Earth Environ (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-025-00726-2

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