The terrestrial carbon and water cycles are often studied separately, yet they are fundamentally interconnected through vegetation, climate, soils, and human activities. Changes in water availability influence vegetation productivity and carbon uptake, while vegetation regulates evapotranspiration, surface-energy exchange, and land–atmosphere feedbacks.

In this review, we bring these processes together to examine India’s terrestrial carbon–water cycle as a coupled and interacting system.

The review synthesises current understanding of:

1. Carbon budgets and vegetation greening in India

2. Hydroclimatic influences on terrestrial ecosystems

3. Land–atmosphere feedbacks

4. State-of-the-art approaches for understanding land–atmosphere interactions

5. Key challenges, research gaps, and future directions

Key challenges identified

The review highlights several important limitations:

• Sparse long-term field and flux observations

• Uncertainty in rainfall and soil-moisture projections

• Limited representation of Indian vegetation dynamics in models

• Insufficient consideration of human management, particularly irrigation and groundwater extraction

Future directions

Looking forward, we highlight the need for an integrated framework that combines field measurements, flux-tower observations, remote sensing, process-based models, causal inference, and explainable physics-guided machine learning.

Such integration will be essential for improving our understanding of vegetation–climate interactions, carbon–water feedbacks, and how these coupled processes may evolve under a changing climate.

Read the full review → https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2515-7620/ae9b6c

31 August–3 September 2026

L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, France