Black carbon (BC) is a major short-lived climate pollutant (SLCP) with significant climate and environmentalhealth impacts. This review synthesizes critical advancements in the identification of emerging anthropogenic BC sources, updates to global warming potential (GWP) and global temperature potential (GTP) metrics, technical progress in characterization techniques, improvements in global-regional monitoring networks, emission inventory, and impact assessment methods. Notably, gas flaring, shipping, and urban waste burning have slowly emerged as dominant emission sources, especially in Asia, Eastern Europe, and Arctic regions. The updated GWP over 100 years for BC is estimated at 342 CO2-eq, compared to 658 CO2-eq in IPCC AR5. Recent CMIP6-based Earth System Models (ESMs) have improved attribution of BC's microphysics, identifying a 22 % increase in radiative forcing (RF) over hotspots like East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Despite progress, challenges persist in monitoring network inter-comparability, emission inventory uncertainty, and underrepresentation of BC processes in ESMs. Future efforts could benefit from the integration of satellite data, artificial intelligence (AI)assisted methods, and harmonized protocols to improve BC assessment. Targeted mitigation strategies could avert up to four million premature deaths globally by 2030, albeit at a 17 % additional cost. These findings highlight BC's pivotal roles in near-term climate and sustainability policy.

The Paris Agreement calls for emissions reductions to limit climate change, but how will the carbon cycle change if it is successful? The land and oceans currently absorb roughly half of anthropogenic emissions, but this fraction will decline in the future. The amount of carbon that can be released before climate is mitigated depends on the amount of carbon the ocean and terrestrial ecosystems can absorb. Policy is based on model projections, but observations and theory suggest that climate effects emerging in today's climate will increase and carbon cycle tipping points may be crossed. Warming temperatures, drought, and a slowing growth rate of CO2 itself will reduce land and ocean sinks and create new sources, making carbon sequestration in forests, soils, and other land and aquatic vegetation more difficult. Observations, data-assimilative models, and prediction systems are needed for managing ongoing long-term changes to land and ocean systems after achieving net-zero emissions. International agreements call for stabilizing climate at 1.5 degrees above preindustrial, while the world is already seeing damaging extremes below that. If climate is stabilized near the 1.5 degrees target, the driving force for most sinks will slow, while feedbacks from the warmer climate will continue to cause sources. Once emissions are reduced to net zero, carbon cycle-climate feedbacks will require observations to support ongoing active management to maintain storage.