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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.