Tropical forest loss declined significantly last year, falling 36% after reaching a record level in 2024. Still, the world lost 10.6 million acres of rainforest — an area roughly the size of Denmark, or more than 11 soccer fields every minute.

New data from the University of Maryland, published through the World Resources Institute’s Global Forest Watch, shows that the loss of mature and largely undisturbed humid tropical forests slowed down in 2025. But it was still 46% higher than a decade earlier, and last year saw a relative lull in wildfires after an exceptionally bad fire year in 2024. Blazes are increasing in the tropics due to warmer temperatures and more severe droughts.

Outside the tropics, the climate signal was starker. Wildfires burned 13 million acres in Canada, making 2025 the country’s second-worst fire year on record. In France, fire-driven tree-cover loss was the most severe on record, seven times higher than in the previous year.

The analysis uses a broad definition of forest loss that includes not just deforestation for agriculture but also timber harvesting and natural disturbances to forests.

At the COP26 climate summit in 2021, more than 100 countries pledged to halt and reverse forest loss by 2030. The world remains far from that goal as agricultural expansion and fires continue to destroy important biodiversity hotspots and carbon sinks. Forest loss in 2025 was still about 70% too high for countries to be on track for the deadline, according to the World Resources Institute, or WRI.

“Achieving this goal in the coming years will not be easy as forests become more vulnerable to climate change, and as humanity’s demand for food, fuel and materials from forests and the lands they stand on continues to grow,” said Elizabeth Goldman, co-director of Global Forest Watch at WRI, during a press briefing.

Agriculture — both large-scale commodity production and subsistence farming — was the biggest driver of tree-cover loss across the tropics in 2025. In countries Brazil and Bolivia, cattle ranching and soy cultivation were major pressures, while coca, oil palms and other crops drove losses in Peru, Laos and elsewhere.

In much of the Congo Basin, forest clearing was tied more closely to shifting cultivation patterns, demand for wood fuel and poverty.

Fires increasingly interact with those pressures. They have consumed twice as much tree cover in the past three years as they did between 2003 and 2005, according to WRI. In the tropics, most fires are sparked by human activity, but hotter and drier conditions linked to climate change are making forests more flammable and allowing wildfires to spread farther and cause more damage.

Brazil, which encompasses two-thirds of the Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest, recorded the largest absolute area of primary forest loss. But it cut that loss by 42% from the previous year. The report attributes the decline to stronger environmental policy and enforcement under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

The improvement stands in stark contrast to 2024, when Brazil’s Amazon suffered its worst drought on record, fueling unprecedented forest fires.

André Lima, Brazil’s secretary for deforestation control, said in a phone interview that the country’s forest policy rests on “two agendas that are intertwined” — curbing deforestation and controlling fires. He said the government relaunched the federal anti-deforestation plan in 2023 under Lula and is now beginning to see results. Citing Brazil’s official data, Lima said Amazon deforestation fell 50% in 2025 compared with 2022.

On fires, Lima argued that the spike in late 2024 should be seen less as a policy breakdown than the result of exceptional climate conditions: a strong El Niño, North Atlantic warming and two consecutive years of drought that left the Amazon far more flammable. He said the government has since stepped up its response with $380 million for fire control, new prevention rules and more support for state fire brigades and municipal involvement.

“A good year is a good year, but you need good years forever if you’re going to conserve the tropical rainforest,” said Matthew Hansen, a remote sensing scientist at the University of Maryland and director of its Global Land Analysis and Discovery (GLAD) laboratory. “And we like the news from this year.”

Source: latimes.com