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Abstract

Climate extremes such as droughts and heatwaves aect terrestrial ecosystems
and may alter local carbon budgets. However, it still remains uncertain
to what degree extreme impacts in the carbon cycle in
uence the carbon
cycle-climate feedback both today and the near future. Here, we analyze
spatiotemporally contiguous negative extreme anomalies in gross primary
production (GPP) and net ecosystem production (NEP) in model output
of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5) ensemble
and investigate their future development and attribution to climatic drivers.
We nd that relative to the overall increase in global carbon uptake, negative
extremes in GPP and NEP lose importance towards the end of the 21st
century. This eect can be related to elevated CO2 concentrations and higher
amounts of available water at the global scale, partially mitigating the impacts
of droughts and heatwaves, respectively. Overall, based on CMIP5 models
we hypothesize that terrestrial ecosystems might be more resilient against
future climate extremes than previously thought. Future work will have to
further scrutinize these results considering that various biological and biogeochemical
feedbacks are not yet integrated within earth system models.