Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
We now live in a 400 parts per million world. Data from the Mauna Loa observatory, Hawaii, suggests carbon dioxide concentration levels are unlikely to consistently fall back below this level in our lifetimes.
Carbon accounting is crucial to efforts to tackle climate change, providing data on where emissions emanate and where they are absorbed. Decision-makers rely on the best information about the earth’s changing sinks and sources as they seek to constrain global emissions.
This collection brings together a selection of multi-disciplinary research and commentary from across the physical and social sciences that explores the major inputs and outputs that comprise the world’s carbon account.