The greenhouse gas budget of terrestrial ecosystems in China since 2000

As one of the world’s economic engine and the largest greenhouse gases (GHGs) emitter of fossil fuel in the past two decades, China has expressed the recent ambition to reduce GHG emissions by mid-century. The status of GHG balance over terrestrial ecosystems in China, however, remains elusive. Here, we present a synthesis of the three most important long-lived greenhouse gases (CO₂, CH₄ and N₂O) budgets over China during the 2000s and 2010s, following a dual constraint bottom-up and top-down approach. We estimate that China’s terrestrial ecosystems act as a small GHG sink (-29.0 ± 207.5 Tg CO₂-eq yr^-1 with the bottom-up estimate and -75.3 ± 496.8 Tg CO₂-eq yr^-1 with the top-down estimate). This net GHG sink includes an appreciable land CO₂ sink, which is being largely offset by CH₄ and N₂O emissions, predominantly coming from the agricultural sector. Emerging data sources and modelling capacities have helped achieve agreement between the top-down and bottom-up approaches to within 25% for all three GHGs, but sizeable uncertainties remain.