Extreme climate events (e.g., drought, heat and cold waves) and disturbances (e.g., fire, hurricane, and insect outbreaks) substantially affect carbon cycle processes. However, their impacts on terrestrial carbon dynamics over landscapes, regions, and continents are not well understood. The contributions of this special issue investigate and quantify the impacts of extreme climate events and disturbances on the terrestrial carbon dynamics over various spatial and temporal scales using observations (e.g., eddy covariance flux measurements, and national inventories), remote sensing, state-of-the-art modeling approaches (e.g., ecosystem models, upscaling methods), and model-data fusion techniques. This special issue is timely and valuable to the research communities of carbon and global change, and will play a critical role in our understanding of how extreme climate events and disturbances influence the terrestrial carbon cycle.