Global warming, caused by the rapid increase of atmospheric CO2 has become an urgent problem for sustainable development of human beings. Terrestrial ecosystems have played an important carbon sink role in the past decades by absorbing about 30% of the CO2 emitted by human activities. This paper reviewed the estimation methods of carbon sequestration rate of terrestrial ecosystems, including sampling inventory, flux monitoring, model simulation, remote sensing, etc., and analyzed the progresses and challenges of the current approaches for accounting terrestrial carbon sequestration. Sampling inventory and flux observations can provide direct measurement of plot-scale carbon sequestration rate, but there are many problems, such as limited observation samples and insufficient spatial representation. Model simulation methods can describe the terrestrial carbon cycles and simulate the state and change of carbon sequestration rates in terrestrial ecosystems. However, the approximating and simplifying processes in model, together with the uncertainties introduced by model-driven data, it is very challenging to accurately modeling the carbon sequestration rate of terrestrial ecosystems. Satellite remote sensing, holding the advantages of global coverage, fine resolution, and time-series observations, combined with machine learning methods, can provide a new approach for the estimation of the carbon sequestration rate of terrestrial ecosystems. So far, various accounting methods for carbon sequestration rates have not yet met the needs of monitoring carbon sequestration in terrestrial ecosystems due to the high spatial and temporal heterogeneity. In the future, it is extremely important to integrate various accounting approaches, such as ground observations, model simulations, and satellite remote sensing, to provide accurate estimation of terrestrial ecosystem carbon sinks at the regional and global scales.