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Biogeochemistry

Closing the carbon mismatch

Nature Geoscience volume 19, page 6 (2026)Cite this article

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However, the issue of budget imbalance has been a persistent challenge throughout the history of the carbon budget assessment — that is, the estimated net carbon emissions fail to balance the observed atmospheric CO2 growth rate. In the GCB 2024 assessment (P. Friedlingstein et al. Earth Syst. Sci. Data. 17, 965–1039; 2025), this imbalance represented 10% of the observation-based CO2 growth rate, which suggests substantial uncertainties in the estimates of sinks and emissions. Such discrepancies prevent accurate assessment of trends in carbon sinks and emissions, as well as the contribution of specific drivers, including human activities.

It is known that the mismatch stems from several obvious long-standing issues in the GCB assessment. For example, most models used for estimating land-related sinks and sources assume constant carbon densities and pre-industrial land cover; the anthropogenic impacts on lateral carbon export remain unaccounted for; and the ocean cool-skin effect is often neglected in the estimates of oceanic carbon sink. While advances in observations and modelling have enabled the inclusion of these missing processes in the assessment of individual components of the carbon cycle, these improvements have not been systematically integrated into the GCB assessment.

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  • 16 January 2026

    In the version of the article initially published, in the paragraph beginning "The improvements lead to substantial revisions..." four instances of "C yr–1" should have read "GtC y–1" and have now been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.

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  1. Nature Geoscience https://www.nature.com/ngeo/

    Xujia Jiang

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  1. Xujia Jiang
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Correspondence to Xujia Jiang.

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Jiang, X. Closing the carbon mismatch. Nat. Geosci. 19, 6 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-025-01906-x

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