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<p>As the focus of climate policy shifts from pledges to implementation, there is a growing need to track progress on climate change mitigation at the country level, particularly for the land-use sector. Despite new<span id="page1094"/> tools and models providing unprecedented monitoring opportunities, striking differences remain in estimations of anthropogenic land-use CO<span class="inline-formula">₂</span> fluxes between, on the one hand, the national greenhouse gas inventories (NGHGIs) used to assess compliance with national climate targets under the Paris Agreement and, on the other hand, the Global Carbon Budget and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment reports, both based on global bookkeeping models (BMs).</p> <p>Recent studies have shown that these differences are mainly due to inconsistent definitions of anthropogenic CO<span class="inline-formula">₂</span> fluxes in managed forests. Countries assume larger areas of forest to be managed than BMs do, due to a broader definition of managed land in NGHGIs. Additionally, the fraction of the land sink caused by indirect effects of human-induced environmental change (e.g. fertilisation effect on vegetation growth due to increased atmospheric CO<span class="inline-formula">₂</span> concentration) on managed lands is treated as non-anthropogenic by BMs but as anthropogenic in most NGHGIs.</p> <p>We implement an approach that adds the CO<span class="inline-formula">₂</span> sink caused by environmental change in countries' managed forests (estimated by 16 dynamic global vegetation models, DGVMs) to the land-use fluxes from three BMs. This sum is conceptually more comparable to NGHGIs and is thus expected to be quantitatively more similar. Our analysis uses updated and more comprehensive data from NGHGIs than previous studies and provides model results at a greater level of disaggregation in terms of regions, countries and land categories (i.e. forest land, deforestation, organic soils, other land uses).</p> <p>Our results confirm a large difference (6.7 GtCO<span class="inline-formula">₂</span> yr<span class="inline-formula">⁻¹</span>) in global land-use CO<span class="inline-formula">₂</span> fluxes between the ensemble mean of the BMs, which estimate a source of 4.8 GtCO<span class="inline-formula">₂</span> yr<span class="inline-formula">⁻¹</span> for the period 2000–2020, and NGHGIs, which estimate a sink of <span class="inline-formula">−1.9</span> GtCO<span class="inline-formula">₂</span> yr<span class="inline-formula">⁻¹</span> in the same period. Most of the gap is found on forest land (3.5 GtCO<span class="inline-formula">₂</span> yr<span class="inline-formula">⁻¹</span>), with differences also for deforestation (2.4 GtCO<span class="inline-formula">₂</span> yr<span class="inline-formula">⁻¹</span>), for fluxes from other land uses (1.0 GtCO<span class="inline-formula">₂</span> yr<span class="inline-formula">⁻¹</span>) and to a lesser extent for fluxes from organic soils (0.2 GtCO<span class="inline-formula">₂</span> yr<span class="inline-formula">⁻¹</span>). By adding the DGVM ensemble mean sink arising from environmental change in managed forests (<span class="inline-formula">−6.4</span> GtCO<span class="inline-formula">₂</span> yr<span class="inline-formula">⁻¹</span>) to BM estimates, the gap between BMs and NGHGIs becomes substantially smaller both globally (residual gap: 0.3 GtCO<span class="inline-formula">₂</span> yr<span class="inline-formula">⁻¹</span>) and in most regions and countries. However, some discrepancies remain and deserve further investigation. For example, the BMs generally provide higher emissions from deforestation than NGHGIs and, when adjusted with the sink in managed forests estimated by DGVMs, yield a sink that is often greater than NGHGIs.</p> <p>In summary, this study provides a blueprint for harmonising the estimations of anthropogenic land-use fluxes, allowing for detailed comparisons between global models and national inventories at global, regional and country levels. This is crucial to increase confidence in land-use emissions estimates, support investments in land-based mitigation strategies and assess the countries' collective progress under the Global Stocktake of the Paris Agreement.</p> <p>Data from this study are openly available online via the Zenodo portal (Grassi et al., 2023) at <a href="https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7650360">https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7650360</a>.</p>