Losses outlast gains in Northern Hemisphere tree growth under climate change

Abstract

Under climate change, will forests grow more or less? The answer differs from place to place, obscuring the overall direction. Here we trace it by learning nonlinear climate--tree-growth relationships from 4110 Northern Hemisphere tree-ring chronologies recorded since 1902, spanning more than 12 million ring-width measurements, and projecting them through the twenty-first century under CMIP6 scenarios. Projected growth declines, and gains and losses are temporally asymmetric: once losses emerge, they are rarely reversed (90% retained), whereas gains fade (56% retained). This asymmetry holds in every well-sampled region and strengthens under higher forcing. The decline itself is driven by warming and rising atmospheric water demand, whose broadly negative contribution outweighs precipitation-driven gains. Across the Northern Hemisphere, growth does not just move between gains and losses; it is drawn steadily downward.