Global Carbon Budget 2020

Abstract

Accurate assessment of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO$_{2}$) emissions and their redistribution among the atmosphere, ocean, and terrestrial biosphere in a changing climate – the “global carbon budget” – is important to better understand the global carbon cycle, support the development of climate policies, and project future climate change. Here we describe and synthesize data sets and methodology to quantify the five major components of the global carbon budget and their uncertainties. Fossil CO$_{2}$ emissions (E$_{FOS}$) are based on energy statistics and cement production data, while emissions from land-use change (E$_{LUC}$), mainly deforestation, are based on land use and land-use change data and bookkeeping models. Atmospheric CO$_{2}$ concentration is measured directly and its growth rate (G$_{ATM}$) is computed from the annual changes in concentration. The ocean CO$_{2}$ sink (S$_{OCEAN}$) and terrestrial CO$_{2}$ sink (S$_{LAND}$) are estimated with global process models constrained by observations. The resulting carbon budget imbalance (B$_{IM}$), the difference between the estimated total emissions and the estimated changes in the atmosphere, ocean, and terrestrial biosphere, is a measure of imperfect data and understanding of the contemporary carbon cycle. All uncertainties are reported as ±1σ. For the last decade available (2010–2019), E$_{FOS}$ was 9.6 ± 0.5 GtC yr$^{-1}$ excluding the cement carbonation sink (9.4 ± 0.5 GtC yr−1 when the cement carbonation sink is included), and E$_{LUC}$ was 1.6 ± 0.7 GtC yr$^{-1}$. For the same decade, G$_{ATM}$ was 5.1 ± 0.02 GtC yr$^{-1}$ (2.4 ± 0.01 ppm yr$_{-1}$), S$_{OCEAN}$ 2.5 ±  0.6 GtC yr$^{-1}$, and S$_{LAND}$ 3.4 ± 0.9 GtC yr$^{-1}$, with a budget imbalance B$_{IM}$ of −0.1 GtC yr$^{-1}$ indicating a near balance between estimated sources and sinks over the last decade. For the year 2019 alone, the growth in E$_{FOS}$ was only about 0.1 % with fossil emissions increasing to 9.9 ± 0.5 GtC yr$^{-1}$ excluding the cement carbonation sink (9.7 ± 0.5 GtC yr$^{-1}$ when cement carbonation sink is included), and E$_{LUC}$ was 1.8 ± 0.7 GtC yr$^{-1}$, for total anthropogenic CO$_{2}$ emissions of 11.5 ± 0.9 GtC yr$^{-1}$ (42.2 ± 3.3 GtCO$_{2}$). Also for 2019, G$_{ATM}$ was 5.4 ± 0.2 GtC yr$^{-1}$ (2.5 ± 0.1 ppm yr$^{-1}$), S$_{OCEAN}$ was 2.6 ± 0.6 GtC yr$^{-1}$, and S$_{LAND}$ was 3.1 ± 1.2 GtC yr$^{-1}$, with a B$_{IM}$ of 0.3 GtC. The global atmospheric CO$_{2}$ concentration reached 409.85 ± 0.1 ppm averaged over 2019. Preliminary data for 2020, accounting for the COVID-19-induced changes in emissions, suggest a decrease in E$_{FOS}$ relative to 2019 of about −7 % (median estimate) based on individual estimates from four studies of −6 %, −7 %, −7 % (−3 % to −11 %), and −13 %. Overall, the mean and trend in the components of the global carbon budget are consistently estimated over the period 1959–2019, but discrepancies of up to 1 GtC yr$^{-1}$ persist for the representation of semi-decadal variability in CO$_{2}$ fluxes. Comparison of estimates from diverse approaches and observations shows (1) no consensus in the mean and trend in land-use change emissions over the last decade, (2) a persistent low agreement between the different methods on the magnitude of the land CO$_{2}$ flux in the northern extra-tropics, and (3) an apparent discrepancy between the different methods for the ocean sink outside the tropics, particularly in the Southern Ocean. This living data update documents changes in the methods and data sets used in this new global carbon budget and the progress in understanding of the global carbon cycle compared with previous publications of this data set (Friedlingstein et al., 2019; Le Quéré et al., 2018b, a, 2016, 2015b, a, 2014, 2013). The data presented in this work are available at https://doi.org/10.18160/gcp-2020 (Friedlingstein et al., 2020)