Increasingly negative tropical water–interannual CO₂ growth rate coupling

Terrestrial ecosystems have taken up about 32% of the total anthropogenic CO₂ emissions in the past six decades ¹. Large uncertainties in terrestrial carbon–climate feedbacks, however, make it difficult to predict how the land carbon sink will respond to future climate change ². Interannual variations in the atmospheric CO₂ growth rate (CGR) are dominated by land–atmosphere carbon fluxes in the tropics, providing an opportunity to explore land carbon–climate interactions ^3–6. It is thought that variations in CGR are largely controlled by temperature ^7–10 but there is also evidence for a tight coupling between water availability and CGR ¹¹. Here, we use a record of global atmospheric CO₂, terrestrial water storage and precipitation data to investigate changes in the interannual relationship between tropical land climate conditions and CGR under a changing climate. We find that the interannual relationship between tropical water availability and CGR became increasingly negative during 1989–2018 compared to 1960–1989. This could be related to spatiotemporal changes in tropical water availability anomalies driven by shifts in El Niño/Southern Oscillation teleconnections, including declining spatial compensatory water effects ⁹. We also demonstrate that most state-of-the-art coupled Earth System and Land Surface models do not reproduce the intensifying water–carbon coupling. Our results indicate that tropical water availability is increasingly controlling the interannual variability of the terrestrial carbon cycle and modulating tropical terrestrial carbon–climate feedbacks.