Global Carbon Budget 2022

11 November 2022

A group of more than 100 researchers from more than 15 countries compiled and documented an annual global carbon budget covering sources and sinks. Coupling detailed observations with advanced models, they itemized emissions from fossil fuel combustion and land use change (mostly deforestation) offset by uptake in ocean, on land and into atmosphere. Emissions increased in the most recent year (2021) and most recent decade. Ocean and land continued to absorb carbon (serve as carbon sinks) while atmospheric concentrations continued to rise. They identify small imbalances due to imperfect knowledge of annual and decadal variability of sources and sinks. For the current year (2022) they project increased emissions and increased atmospheric concentrations to, effectively, levels now 50% higher than pre-industrial values. They present data and conclusions in the Copernicus open-access journal Earth System Science Data; interested readers will find descriptions of data and conclusions in https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/14/4811/2022/ and can access all original global and national data here: https://doi.org/10.18160/GCP-2022.


The annual update of the global carbon budget is produced by the Global Carbon Project and was started in 2006. This is the 11th update of the global carbon budget published by ESSD in the living data format:

Global Carbon Budget 2022
Pierre Friedlingstein, Michael O'Sullivan, Matthew W. Jones, Robbie M. Andrew, Luke Gregor, Judith Hauck, Corinne Le Quéré, Ingrid T. Luijkx, Are Olsen, Glen P. Peters, Wouter Peters, Julia Pongratz, Clemens Schwingshackl, Stephen Sitch, Josep G. Canadell, Philippe Ciais, Robert B. Jackson, Simone R. Alin, Ramdane Alkama, Almut Arneth, Vivek K. Arora, Nicholas R. Bates, Meike Becker, Nicolas Bellouin, Henry C. Bittig, Laurent Bopp, Frédéric Chevallier, Louise P. Chini, Margot Cronin, Wiley Evans, Stefanie Falk, Richard A. Feely, Thomas Gasser, Marion Gehlen, Thanos Gkritzalis, Lucas Gloege, Giacomo Grassi, Nicolas Gruber, Özgür Gürses, Ian Harris, Matthew Hefner, Richard A. Houghton, George C. Hurtt, Yosuke Iida, Tatiana Ilyina, Atul K. Jain, Annika Jersild, Koji Kadono, Etsushi Kato, Daniel Kennedy, Kees Klein Goldewijk, Jürgen Knauer, Jan Ivar Korsbakken, Peter Landschützer, Nathalie Lefèvre, Keith Lindsay, Junjie Liu, Zhu Liu, Gregg Marland, Nicolas Mayot, Matthew J. McGrath, Nicolas Metzl, Natalie M. Monacci, David R. Munro, Shin-Ichiro Nakaoka, Yosuke Niwa, Kevin O'Brien, Tsuneo Ono, Paul I. Palmer, Naiqing Pan, Denis Pierrot, Katie Pocock, Benjamin Poulter, Laure Resplandy, Eddy Robertson, Christian Rödenbeck, Carmen Rodriguez, Thais M. Rosan, Jörg Schwinger, Roland Séférian, Jamie D. Shutler, Ingunn Skjelvan, Tobias Steinhoff, Qing Sun, Adrienne J. Sutton, Colm Sweeney, Shintaro Takao, Toste Tanhua, Pieter P. Tans, Xiangjun Tian, Hanqin Tian, Bronte Tilbrook, Hiroyuki Tsujino, Francesco Tubiello, Guido R. van der Werf, Anthony P. Walker, Rik Wanninkhof, Chris Whitehead, Anna Willstrand Wranne, Rebecca Wright, Wenping Yuan, Chao Yue, Xu Yue, Sönke Zaehle, Jiye Zeng, and Bo Zheng
Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 14, 4811–4900, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-14-4811-2022, 2022

Contact: Pierre Friedlingstein (p.friedlingstein@exeter.ac.uk)