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In the context of global warming, it is of paramount importance to scrutinize the impact of rising temperatures, including extreme heat events, on plant photosynthesis. While some studies have examined the distinct responses between sunlit and shaded leaves at a localized scale, there remains a substantial gap in studies that extend this exploration to a regional or global scale, encompassing a broad variety of vegetation types and diverse climatic conditions. In this study, we employ the Breathing Earth System Simulator (BESS), a process-based, two-leaf water-carbon-energy coupled model, to simulate the photosynthesis of sunlit and shaded leaves on a global scale, and investigate their potentially divergent responses to rising temperature. Our findings reveal that, globally, the gross primary production (GPP) of sunlit leaves contributes more to the total canopy GPP than that of shaded leaves. In contrast, in mesic …