Global Carbon Budget 2018

The yearly assessment of the global carbon budget is not only relevant to unravel the global carbon cycle but also to underpin climate policies and to predict future climate development. The budget components such as fossil CO₂ emissions, atmospheric CO₂ concentrations, the ocean and terrestrial sinks as well as imbalances have just been released in the open access journal Earth System Science Data.

Sönke Zaehle and Christian Rödenbeck, both scientists from Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany, have contributed with improving dynamic global vegetation models and assessing the ocean CO₂ exchange from data.

The Global Carbon Project is a large international research project and part of the Future Earth initiative on global sustainability. It strives to develop a comprehensive picture of the global carbon cycle, making available up-to-date estimations of global CO₂ emissions and sinks as well as information on the state of the climate system by taking into account both its biophysical and anthropogenic dimensions.