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A re-assessment of the global carbon budget shows the natural land sink is substantially smaller than previously estimated, indicating emerging impacts of climate change on the evolution of the carbon sinks.

This study investigates the effects of forestation on temperature in Europe using climate model experiments. The findings indicate that conversion from coniferous to broadleaved trees in currently forested areas can provide cooling for summer hot extremes.

Accelerated storage of terrestrial carbon during the slow warming period (1998–2012) can be predominantly attributed to lower land-use emissions due to decreased tropical forest loss and increased afforestation in the northern temperate regions.

Forestation can be a valuable tool for mitigating climate change. Using an Earth System Model, Moustakis et al. show that ambitious deployment in the range of country pledges can mitigate global temperature under an overshoot pathway by 0.2 ^oC, but highlight the associated socioeconomic tradeoffs.

Forests recovering from human disturbance act as a substantial sink that helps to absorb anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions. Simulations suggest that nutrient limitation reduces that effect.

This study shows that combining land- and ocean-based Carbon Dioxide Removal methods does not compromise their effectiveness. This offers flexibility in designing diverse, sustainable mitigation strategies, reducing pressure on land systems.

Changes in the leaf area index alter the distribution of heat and moisture. The change in energy partitioning related to leaf area, increasing latent and decreasing sensible fluxes over the observational period 1982–2016, is moderated by plant functional type and background climate.

Robust quantification of carbon dioxide fluxes from land use is critical for guiding climate change mitigation efforts and for improved understanding of the global carbon cycle. This Perspective explores the origins of uncertainties and discrepancies in established estimation approaches and considers strategies to improve, translate and harmonize flux estimates.

The global net land sink is relatively well constrained. However, the responsible drivers and above/below-ground partitioning are highly uncertain. Model issues regarding turnover of individual plant and soil components are responsible.

Trends in the rate of region- and sector-specific land-use greenhouse gas emissions in 1961–2017 show an acceleration of about 20% per decade after 2001.

Integrating environmental effects into a bookkeeping model finds an increase in CO₂ emissions from land-use change by 14% in 2012–2021. It further shows that state-of-the-art process-based models overestimate the natural terrestrial CO₂ sink by 23%.

Accurate estimates of carbon fluxes are important to our understanding of the carbon cycle. Here, via model-data integration, the authors disentangle anthropogenic and environmental carbon flux contributions of terrestrial woody vegetation, and find that environmental processes are weaker and more susceptible to interannual variations and extreme events in the 21st century than previously estimated.

The direct effects of land-cover change on surface climate are increasingly well understood, but fewer studies have investigated the consequences of the trend towards more intensive land management practices. Now, research investigating the biophysical effects of temperate land-management changes reveals a net warming effect of similar magnitude to that driven by changing land cover.

Climate science and national emissions reporting communities have historically used different definitions and methods for anthropogenic land-based carbon removals. As the mitigation agenda accelerates, reconciling these differences for comparability and moving towards integration is crucial for enhancing confidence in land-use emission estimates.

Understanding the various and multiple trade-offs of land-use changes and cropland expansion can contribute to more sustainable policies. A study explores future scenarios of cropland expansion along with the trade-offs in agricultural production and markets, biodiversity and CO₂ emissions.

In a world of deepening inequalities, climate polices might be feasible in high-income countries only. Here the authors find that overcoming global inequality through sustainable socio-economic development is critical for land-based mitigation in line with the Paris Agreement.

Remote sensing and in situ observations show that non-radiative mechanisms dominate the local climatic response to land cover and land management changes in most regions of the globe for 8 of 9 common land cover and management perturbations.

The model–inventory discrepancy in net land-use carbon emissions mainly results from conceptual differences in estimating anthropogenic forest sinks. A revised disaggregation of global land model results allows greater comparability with inventories.

Between 2010 and 2019 Eastern Europe’s terrestrial carbon sink declined, because tree regrowth in abandoned agricultural areas saturated and more timber was removed from forests, according to an analysis of above-ground biomass data.

Analyses of potential and actual biomass stocks indicate that trade-offs exist between conserving carbon stocks on managed land and raising the contribution of biomass to raw material and energy supply for the mitigation of climate change.

A manipulative experiment in which a reef is alkalinized in situ shows that calcification rates are likely to be lower already than they were in pre-industrial times because of acidification.

A satellite-based estimate of forest regrowth carbon flux across the Northern Hemisphere suggests forest disturbance and regrowth are transient but important aspects of the carbon sink that may explain underestimates from dynamic global vegetation models

The Brazilian Amazon was a net carbon source during recent climate extremes and the south-eastern Amazon was a net land carbon source between 2010 and 2020 due to increasing human-induced disturbance and drought, suggest bottom-up and top-down estimates of land carbon fluxes.

Large solar farms in the Sahara Desert could redistribute solar power generation potential locally as well as globally through disturbance of large-scale atmospheric teleconnections, according to simulations with an Earth system model.