@Article{Randerson_SciAdv_20250910,
 author		= {James T. Randerson and Yue Li and Weiwei Fu and Francois Primeau and Jinhyuk E. Kim and Mingquan Mu and Forrest M. Hoffman and Anna T. Trugman and Linqing Yang and Chao Wu and Jonathan A. Wang and William R. L. Anderegg and Alessandro Baccini and Mark A. Friedl and Sassan S. Saatchi and A. Scott Denning and Michael L. Goulden},
 title		= {The Weak Land Carbon Sink Hypothesis},
 journal	= SciAdv,
 volume		= 11,
 number		= 37,
 pages		= {eadr5489},
 doi		= {10.1126/sciadv.adr5489},
 day		= 10,
 month		= sep,
 year		= 2025,
 abstract	= {Over the past three decades, assessments of the contemporary global carbon budget consistently report a strong net land carbon sink. Here, we review evidence supporting this paradigm and quantify the differences in global and Northern Hemisphere estimates of the net land sink derived from atmospheric inversion and satellite-derived vegetation biomass time series. Our analysis, combined with additional synthesis, supports a hypothesis that the net land sink is substantially weaker than commonly reported. At a global scale, our estimate of the net land carbon sink is $0.8 \pm 0.7$ petagrams of carbon per year from 2000 through 2019, nearly a factor of two lower than the Global Carbon Project estimate. With concurrent adjustments to ocean (+8\%) and fossil fuel ($-$6\%) fluxes, we develop a budget that partially reconciles key constraints provided by vegetation carbon, the north-south CO$_2$ gradient, and O$_2$ trends. We further outline potential modifications to models to improve agreement with a weaker land sink and describe several approaches for testing the hypothesis. Satellite-derived time series of vegetation carbon do not support a strong Northern Hemisphere net land carbon sink.}
}