The Paris Agreement calls for stabilizing climate at 1.5°C warming, requiring rapid reductions in emissions and careful management of land and ocean sinks. To support these goals, the carbon cycle science community must confront three major challenges:

1) improving the accuracy, reliability, understanding, and uncertainty quantification of global carbon stocks,

2) tracking timely changes in carbon stocks/flows resulting from policy, mitigation, and
carbon-climate feedbacks, and

3) predicting future changes to stocks/flows under changing emission scenarios and climate.

Addressing these challenges requires improved engagement across Earth System observation, modeling, and stakeholder communities. There is a need to ensure that existing and future ground, air, and space observations can support carbon stock/flow assessment and prediction efforts across a range of space-time scales. Timely and reliable information is critically needed to better inform Nationally Determined Contributions under the UNFCCC Global Stocktake and subsequent GHG mitigation efforts that are underway or being planned. In response to recommendations for expanded stakeholder engagement in the NASA decadal survey and mid-term assessment, representatives from the carbon cycle community are working together to develop a community vision and framework for characterizing carbon stocks, their changes over time, and associated uncertainties. This approach meets the needs for actionable information on GHG mitigation by mapping decisionmaker’s needs, gaps, and opportunities to systems that would meet those needs. This presentation will summarize community-driven recommendations to improve carbon stock estimates, including: near-term plans to monitor carbon stocks through national and international efforts, state-of-the-science for generating gridded sectoral flux estimates, uncertainties in our present understanding of carbon fluxes and drivers, and anticipated uncertainties in the future as we transition to carbon neutrality during 2035 to 2050. We will conclude with ideas and plans for addressing other obstacles and the whole-of-community approach that will be needed to tackle the three challenges listed above in order to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.