Global tree loss fell 14 percent in 2025 from the year before, according to a report published on Wednesday by World Resources Institute, with the decline largely driven by progress in protecting tropical forests.
The total area destroyed worldwide was roughly 63 million acres, or 25.5 million hectares, the institute’s annual analysis found. But less tree cover was razed intentionally last year than any other year in the past decade, and losses in primary tropical forests were 36 percent lower than last year’s record highs.
The report was a bright spot amid a concerning trend of global forest loss, researchers said.
“Generally speaking, a good year is a good year,” said Matt Hansen, a professor at the University of Maryland and director of the Global Land Analysis and Discovery laboratory, which contributed forest-loss data to the report. “But you need good years forever if you’re going to conserve the tropical rainforest.”
Last year’s gains were offset, however, by destruction from wildfires, which consumed about 26 million acres, an area almost as large as Cuba.
Scientists have found that the changing climate is setting the stage for extreme wildfires, which are doubling in both frequency and intensity worldwide. Climate change is also intensifying droughts and storms, and facilitating the spread of pests and diseases that can harm forests.
“We’re on a kind of knife’s edge,” said Rod Taylor, global director for forest and nature conservation at the World Resources Institute. The biome could reach a tipping point, he said, in which forests are no longer powerful carbon sinks that help regulate the climate, but become a source of planet-warming carbon emissions, released when they are burned or logged.
The institute issued a separate report this year that found that forests around the world were absorbing only a quarter of the carbon that they once did, and some areas have become a net source of emissions.
More than 140 countries have agreed to halt and reverse forest loss by 2030, but deforestation remains 70 percent higher than the level needed for the world to meet that commitment, the report found.
Achieving the 2030 goal will not be easy, said Elizabeth Goldman, co-director of the institute’s Global Forest Watch platform. “But still, several countries showed that strong policy action can reduce forest loss quickly,” she said.
Some of the biggest gains this year were seen in Brazil, home to most of the Amazon rainforest. The rate of deforestation in the country last year fell 41 percent from the year before. It was the lowest amount of human-caused deforestation recorded since the institute began monitoring the country.
The report attributed the progress to the environmental policies of Brazil’s current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The government has restarted an anti-deforestation campaign and issued more environmental-violation notices and fines.
And it found that policy changes in other tropical countries had yielded results, too.
Malaysia’s government is restricting the growth of oil palm plantations, a primary driver of deforestation, and pledged to maintain 50 percent of its land as forests. Colombia is tracking deforesting industries, like cattle ranching, and has passed laws granting Indigenous communities self-government on some forested lands, which research shows helps conserve trees.
In other countries, the news was mixed. It has been nearly a decade since Indonesia, which is home to a large share of the world’s remaining tropical forests, hit a new deforestation record. Even so, forest loss surged 14 percent in the last year.
That’s partly because Indonesia has recently adopted a multibillion-dollar plan to expand rice and sugar cane plantations. The growth of mining is also fueling forest loss.
In the Northern Hemisphere, 2025 was one of the worst fire seasons in Canada’s history, second only to 2023. More than 10 million acres of the country’s forests burned, forcing the evacuation of tens of thousands of people and blanketing a number of North American cities with smoke. Record high summer temperatures and drought also fueled large wildfires across Southern Europe.
“The thing about these major reports is that the numbers jump up and down year to year,” said David Lindenmayer, a professor of forest ecology in the Fenner School of Environment and Society at the Australian National University who was not involved in the report. The good news is welcome, but poor policy can easily reverse those trends, he said.
Some policies end up backfiring, he said. In the last several decades, many countries have tried to promote sustainability certifications for wood products, including ones that require producers to replant trees. But research shows these certification programs don’t slow deforestation, Dr. Lindenmayer said.
Tree plantations, which are increasingly common worldwide, are more likely to catch fire and burn hotter, he said. This increased flammability is generally true for at least the first 70 years of any new forest growth, whether planted or regenerating naturally.
These so-called secondary forests are now thought to cover more land than primary ones, and tree plantations in many countries, like Chile and Portugal, have been rocked by large wildfires in recent years.
Sachi Kitajima Mulkey covers climate and the environment for The Times.
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