This project aims to transform how we quantify land carbon budgets by integrating new Earth Observation data, advanced modelling, and AI to improve the monitoring and understanding of land-use emissions and the natural carbon sink.
The largest uncertainty in the global carbon budget is in emissions from land-use, which has an uncertainty of approximately 60%. This is mainly because, until now, we have lacked the tools and data to quantify emissions from deforestation and degradation in the tropics with sufficient accuracy and temporal consistency, and to capture recent afforestation in many extratropical regions.
The legacy of land-use decisions today will impact the remaining carbon budget required to achieve climate targets in the coming decades. As a society, we also rely on the land ecosystems to take up around one-third of all anthropogenic CO2 emissions, i.e. the natural land carbon sink which is also highly uncertain at interannual to decadal timescales.
Better quantification and understanding of the complex carbon flows involved in the land carbon cycle is therefore paramount. The Global Carbon Budget is the most comprehensive source of data and information about regional-to-global scale carbon fluxes; it is updated annually and published at the UNFCCC COP meetings every year.
Our project seeks to reduce the persistently high land flux uncertainties, employing a combination of new datasets, a deeper process-understanding, sophisticated models and an improved experimental design. We will transform the way we monitor land-use, disturbance, vegetation structure, biomass and biomass change using newly available high-resolution Earth Observation combined with the latest methodological advances in AI and modeling.
Project Start Date: October 1, 2025
