Global increase in biomass carbon stock dominated by growth of northern young forests over past decade

Changes in terrestrial carbon storage under environmental and land-use changes remain a critical source of uncertainty in regional and global carbon budgets. We generated global maps of annual live vegetation biomass using L-band microwave vegetation optical depth. Globally, biomass carbon stocks increased from 2010 to 2019 at a rate of 0.50 ± 0.20 PgC yr−1 with a year-to-year variability, closely mirroring the observations of the global atmospheric CO2 growth rate. The main contributors to the global carbon sink are boreal and temperate forests, while wet tropical forests are small carbon sources, from deforestation and agriculture-related disturbances. We found that the tropical deforested and degraded old-growth forests (>140 yr) are nearly carbon neutral whereas temperate and boreal young (< 50 yr) and middle-aged (50–140 yr) forests are the largest sinks. By contrast, dynamic global vegetation models show that all old-growth forests are large sinks and largely ignore the impacts of deforestation and degradation on tropical biomass. Our findings highlight the importance of forest demography when predicting dynamics of future carbon sink under changing climate