Michael Robin Raupach was an Australian climate scientist. He is credited with developing the concept of a carbon budget, the amount of CO2 that is emitted and absorbed in the global ecosystem in the course of a year. When the in balance, CO2 emissions and absorption in carbon sinks are roughly the same, but when disturbed, possibly large changes in the ecosystem ensue. He was a founding co-chair of the Global Carbon Project (GCP), a network of the world's leading carbon cycle researchers. He was instrumental in publishing the Annual Carbon Budget, which draws on a large amount of scientific data to determine the level of imbalance and options for addressing it.