Global carbon cycle

The figure presents a schematic of how human activities have disrupted the global carbon cycle, averaged over 2014–2023.

Understanding the global carbon cycle requires accurate estimates of carbon stocks in the atmosphere, ocean and land, as well as the rate of flow, or fluxes, between them. However, significant uncertainties (indicated by +/- symbols) remain, particularly in terrestrial components such as land-use change emissions and land-carbon sink uptake. These uncertainties highlight the fact that it is not currently possible to estimate these components accurately.

With forest biomass representing a proxy for stored carbon, ESA's Biomass mission has been designed to measure forest biomass, height and disturbance to address gaps in our knowledge of these parts of the carbon cycle.