In 2021, more than 140 countries around the world promised to put an end to deforestation by the end of the decade. Those countries — including Brazil, Colombia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, all of which are heavily forested — acknowledged in their pledge a basic, undeniable fact: Forests provide critical services that we rely on, from producing oxygen to cooling the landscape.
That pledge, just like similar promises made over the years, has so far failed to do much at all.
While there’s some year-to-year variation, deforestation is going up, not down. And last year, the destruction reached new heights. New data from the University of Maryland, a leading authority on global forest loss, reveals that the tropics lost more than 6.7 million hectares (16.6 million acres) in 2024. That’s around the size of Panama and the largest extent of loss in at least the last two decades, the length of UMD’s record.
The analysis focused on the tropics because that’s where most deforestation, or deliberate forest clearing, occurs. Tropical forests, which center around the equator, are also global hotspots of animal diversity.
The researchers linked the recent surge in deforestation to an increase in forest fires, as well as industrial agriculture. Unlike in temperate or boreal forests in North America and Europe, fires here are not a natural part of the ecosystem, according to Elizabeth Goldman, co-director of Global Forest Watch, a project run by the World Resources Institute, which published the findings along with UMD. Most of those fires were likely ignited by people to clear land for cattle and commercial crops such as soybeans, Goldman said. Once lit, those fires burn out of control “because of hot and dry conditions,” she said.
Last year was the warmest on record. Rising temperatures and the wildfires they fuel are both clear signals of climate change.
“The 2024 numbers must be a wake-up call to every country, every bank, every international business,” Goldman said in a press call last week. “Continuing down this path will devastate economies, people’s jobs and any chance of staving off climate change’s worst effects.”
But there’s not much of a reason to believe that the world will heed this wake-up call.
Most of the big forest nations that promised to end deforestation by 2030 are experiencing more forest loss than they did when they made the pledge. The US, meanwhile, is moving in the wrong direction under President Donald Trump: While the country has few tropical forests, it’s attempting to supercharge climate-warming fossil fuels and upend the science needed to understand how tropical forests are changing.
The lack of progress is frustrating, said Elsa Ordway, an ecologist and tropical forest expert at University of California Los Angeles who was not involved in the analysis. For many people, reports about forest loss seem to be just “background noise,” she said. “When we’re thinking about a planetary crisis that our entire species needs to confront and it’s being ignored, it’s incredibly disheartening,” Ordway said. “We need to be taking these trends very seriously.”
And forest loss in the Amazon or central Africa isn’t just some distant problem with no bearing on peoples’ lives outside the tropics. Everyone depends on these forests — whether for the very real pharmaceutical drugs derived from jungle plants or for the carbon emissions they absorb, which helps slow the pace of warming. Our actions impact these forests too: Certain foods we buy in the supermarket are fueling this destruction. The No. 1 driver of deforestation in Brazil, for example, is clearing forests to raise cattle, some of which is exported as beef. (“Maybe don’t consume beef from Brazil,” Ordway says.)
The analysis did include a few bits of good news: The pace of deforestation in Indonesia, a heavily forested country, remains low, following years of devastating loss. While wildfires caused record-breaking forest loss in Bolivia last year, a newly established Indigenous territory in the country was able to keep fires at bay, according to WRI. “Supporting community-led management can have a real impact,” Ordway said.
But the headline takeaway is, as it’s been for years now, bleak: The world’s tropical forests continue to fall. Will the story ever change?
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