Abstract
African tropical moist forests are critical regulators of global carbon cycling, yet their contributions to national carbon budgets remain poorly constrained, impairing effective policy design. Here, we unravel carbon removals and emissions for 18 African tropical countries using multiple approaches over a data-rich period (2015–2019). Across countries, carbon removals (−286 ± 68.4 TgC yr−1) nearly offset land-use change emissions (343.4 ± 100.3 TgC yr−1), with consistent net fluxes between bottom-up and top-down approaches (57.4 ± 121.4 TgC yr−1 versus 99.1 ± 164.5 TgC yr−1). Results vary between countries, with highest removals in intact forests in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (−81.7 ± 64.2 TgC yr−1), lowest land-use change emissions in Gabon (2.6 ± 7.1 TgC yr−1), and highest fossil fuel emissions in Nigeria (31.2 ± 1.6 TgC yr−1). African tropical countries show high carbon removal rates and land-use change emissions but low fossil fuel emissions, contrasting with industrialized countries. (Inter)nationally endorsed conservation policies can reverse national carbon budgets from net sources to sinks.
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Acknowledgements
We acknowledge the Global Carbon Project, which is responsible for the Global Carbon Budget and we thank the land modelling groups for producing and making available their model outputs. We thank Santiago Botía, Anthony A. Bloom, and Wouter Peters for their input on the analysis. During the preparation of this work, the authors used ChatGPT version 4 and Claude versions 3-4 to refine the language, grammar, and clarity of the text. The tool did not introduce new ideas or arguments. The authors reviewed and edited all suggested changes, and take full responsibility for the final content.
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W.W.M.V. was funded by FWO and F.R.S.-FNRS under the Excellence of Science program (EOS O.0026.22) at Ghent University. W.H. received support from the Belgian Science Policy Office (BELSPO; projects: FED-tWIN2019-prf-075-CongoFORCE, EF/211/TREE4FLUX, B2/223/P1/DAMOCO), from the Flemish Research Council (FWO; project G014123N COBARCHIVES), and from the Belgian Directorate-General for Development Cooperation and Humanitarian Aid (DGD; projects PilotMABplus). FM was funded by the FWO as a senior postdoc and under an ERC runner-up project (FWO grants no. 1214723N and G0BHJ26N) and is thankful to this organization for its financial support. M.B. acknowledges the financial support of the European Research Council ERC Starting grant [FORECAT, grant no. 101114639]. P.R. received financial support from the European Space Agency (ESA) project Climate-space RECCAP2: Global land carbon budget and its attribution to regional drivers. Excellence of Science program EOS O.0026.22 (W.W.M.V.), Belgian Science Policy Office FED-tWIN2019-prf-075-CongoFORCE, EF/211/TREE4FLUX, B2/223/P1/DAMOCO (W.H.), DGD PilotMABplus (W.H.), ERC FORECAT 101114639 (M.B.), Research Foundation Flanders 1214723N and G0BHJ26N (F.M.).
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Verbiest, W.W.M., Bauters, M., Lewis, S.L. et al. Carbon dioxide removals by tropical moist forests offset most land-use emissions across 18 Afrotropical countries.
Commun Earth Environ (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-026-03710-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-026-03710-w
Source: Ecology - nature.com
