Dryness stress weakens the sustainability of global vegetation cooling

Dryness stress can limit vegetation growth, and the cooling potential of vegetation will also be strongly influenced. However, it is still unclear how dryness stress feedback weakens the sustainability of vegetation-based cooling. Based on the long-time series of multi-source remote sensing product data for the period 2001–2020, the relative contribution rate, and the method of decoupling and boxing, we determined that greening will likely mitigate global warming by 0.065 ± 0.009 °C/a, but nearly 47 % of the area is unsustainable. This phenomenon is strongly related to dryness stress. The restricted area of soil moisture (SM: 68.35 %) to vegetation is larger than that of the atmospheric vapor pressure deficit (VPD: 34.19 %). With the decrease in SM, vegetation will decrease by an average of 14.9 %, and with the increase in VPD, vegetation will decrease by 3.8 %. With the continuous increase in the dryness stress area, the sustainability of the vegetation cooling effect will be threatened in an area of about 21.03 million km2, which is equivalent to the area of North America. Specifically, we found that with the decrease in SM and the increase in VPD, the contribution of vegetation to the cooling effect has been weakened by 10.8 %. This conclusion confirms that dryness stress will threaten the sustainability of vegetation-based climate cooling and provides further insight into the effect of dryness stress on vegetation cooling.