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The global carbon budget provides annual updates to society on the main cause of climate change—CO2 emissions—and quantifies carbon-uptake ecosystem services provisioned by the biosphere. We show that more consistent assumptions in the estimates of land-atmosphere carbon exchange results in a global carbon budget that is imbalanced (gains do not equal losses). This imbalance implies that key processes causing land carbon fluxes, especially processes associated with human land management and recovery following abandonment in anthropogenic biomes (anthromes), have been misquantified. This impacts policy for land carbon management across scales and calls for better understanding of carbon cycling in anthromes.