Despite emissions from wildfires, changes in land use and extreme variability in carbon uptake from the biosphere, Australian ecosystems absorbed enough carbon to offset nearly a third of its fossil-fuel emissions between 1990 and 2011.

Vanessa Haverd of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Canberra and her colleagues combined a regional biogeochemical model with emissions data extracted from databases and the literature to produce a comprehensive carbon budget. Contributing to the offset, rising carbon dioxide levels and climate change increased carbon uptake by around 80 million tonnes per year, whereas fire and land-use change boosted carbon emissions by an average of 44 million tonnes per year. In addition, Australia exported 1.5 times more carbon in fossil fuels than it consumed over the two decades, and 2.5 times more from 2009 to 2010.

Biogeosciences 10, 851–869 (2013)