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Accurate evaluation of terrestrial carbon balance is essential for designing climate change mitigation policies, and capabilities of remote sensing techniques in monitoring carbon fluxes are widely recognized for their great contributions to regional and global carbon budget accounting. In this review, we synthesized satellite-based data and methodologies to estimate the main flux components of terrestrial carbon balance and their uncertainties over the past two decades. The global gross primary production (GPP) during the period 2001–2022 is 134 ± 14 PgC yr⁻¹, and nearly half of them occurs in tropical forest regions such as South America and Africa. Less than 2% of global GPP is converted into a net carbon sink of 2.28 ± 1.12 PgC yr⁻¹ using satellite-based atmospheric inversion during 2015–2020, and this sink is comparable to the stock change-based estimate (2.49 PgC yr⁻¹) but twice as large as model …