Deforestation statistics 2026

The world lost an average of 10.9 million hectares of forest a year to deforestation between 2015 and 2025, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).¹ Satellites add a second picture: they recorded 25.5 million hectares of tree cover loss in 2025, including 4.3 million hectares of tropical primary rainforest.² Below are the latest figures, what each one measures, and where it comes from.

How much of the world is covered by forest?

Forests cover 4.14 billion hectares, close to one-third (32%) of the world's land. That works out to about half a hectare of forest per person.¹ The tropics hold the largest share, 45% of all forest, and more than half (54%) of the world's forest area sits in just five countries: Russia, Brazil, Canada, the United States and China.¹

Primary forests, naturally regenerated forests of native species with no visible signs of human activity,¹⁴ cover at least 1.18 billion hectares, or 29% of all forest. FAO estimates they were lost at 1.61 million hectares a year in 2015–2025, less than half the rate of 2000–2015.¹ All the world's forests together store an estimated 714 gigatonnes of carbon.¹

How much forest is lost every year?

There are two headline numbers, and they measure different things. Both are valid. They should never be added together or compared as if they were the same.

Deforestation: FAO's 10.9 million hectares a year

FAO defines deforestation as the conversion of forest to another land use, such as farming or infrastructure.⁴ Its Global Forest Resources Assessment 2025 draws on reports for 236 countries and areas.⁴ It estimates that deforestation averaged 10.9 million hectares a year in 2015–2025, down from 13.6 million in 2000–2015 and 17.6 million in 1990–2000. Since 1990, 489 million hectares of forest have been lost this way.⁴

Most of it happens in the tropics: 88% of all deforestation between 1990 and 2025, at a tropical rate of 9.42 million hectares a year in the latest decade. South America had the highest regional rate in 2015–2025 (4.22 million hectares a year), followed by Africa (3.45 million).⁴

Because forests also regrow and are planted, the net loss is smaller: 4.12 million hectares a year in 2015–2025, down from 10.7 million in the 1990s. Forest expansion slowed too, from 9.88 million hectares a year in 2000–2015 to 6.78 million.¹ FAO itself warns that many countries do not collect data on deforestation and forest expansion, so these change estimates should be read with caution.⁴

Tree cover loss: Global Forest Watch's 25.5 million hectares in 2025

Global Forest Watch, run by the World Resources Institute (WRI), publishes annual satellite data from the University of Maryland's GLAD lab; since 2026 the data also appear on WRI's new Global Nature Watch platform.² It measures tree cover loss: the complete removal of tree cover, meaning woody vegetation at least 5 meters tall, for any reason, including fire, logging, plantation harvests and natural events.⁵

In 2025 the world recorded 25.5 million hectares of tree cover loss, 14% less than in 2024.² The 2024 total, 30 million hectares, was the highest on record.⁶ Since 2000 the world has lost 543 million hectares of tree cover, about 14% of the tree cover that existed in 2000.⁵

Why the two numbers differ

Tree cover loss is not the same as deforestation. WRI estimates that roughly 36% of the tree cover lost since 2000 was likely deforestation: permanent conversion to farms, mines, infrastructure or settlements. The rest was more likely temporary, from fire, logging or natural disturbance, where forest may grow back.⁵ The satellite data also count plantations and tree crops, which most definitions do not treat as forest.⁵ FAO, by contrast, counts only land-use change, from national data, averaged over a decade.

Tropical primary forest loss in 2025: the latest numbers

Losing tropical primary rainforest does lasting harm: even where forest grows back, it is unlikely to match the carbon and biodiversity value of the original for several decades or longer.⁸ In 2025 the tropics lost 4.3 million hectares of primary forest, an area about the size of Denmark.³ That is more than 11 football fields every minute.²

It was a 36% drop from the record set in 2024, yet loss remains 46% higher than a decade ago.² At current levels, the world is about 70% above the path needed to halt and reverse forest loss by 2030, a goal more than 140 countries signed up to in Glasgow.³

Looking further back, earlier spikes in 2016 and 2017 were also driven by fire. Since the turn of the century the humid tropics have lost 87 million hectares of primary forest, 8.5% of what stood in 2001, and Brazil, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Indonesia account for 62% of that loss.⁸

How much of the loss was fire?

Fires caused 42% of all global tree cover loss in 2025, with the most visible impact in boreal and temperate forests.² In the tropics, fire-driven primary forest loss fell by half compared with 2024, and loss not linked to fire came to roughly 2.7 million hectares.⁹ Some fire loss counted in 2025 actually happened in late 2024 but was hidden from satellites by smoke.² In humid tropical forests, fire is not a natural part of the ecosystem: it is almost always set by people.⁵

Top 10 countries for tropical primary forest loss in 2025

– The 2025 summary by the World Resources Institute ranks these countries but does not state their hectares. The full figures are in the Global Nature Watch country data.

The ranking follows WRI's 2025 top 10 chart.² Hectare figures are shown only where WRI or reporting on its release published them; "not published" means the figure was not in those texts, not that it is unknown. Full country data is available on Global Forest Watch. For the biggest forest of all, see our page on the Amazon.

What drives the loss, and what does it cost?

Drivers: mostly farming

FAO's satellite survey found that agricultural expansion drives almost 90% of global deforestation. Conversion to cropland accounts for more than half, and livestock grazing for almost 40%.¹¹ A 2022 review in Science reached a similar answer for the tropics: agriculture drove 90 to 99% of deforestation in 2011–2015, although only 45 to 65% of the cleared land became productive farmland within a few years.¹²

Satellite data on the causes of all tree cover loss since 2001 put permanent agriculture first (172 million hectares), followed by wildfire (163 million) and logging (135 million).⁵ The full breakdown, commodity by commodity and region by region, is on our page about what is causing deforestation.

Emissions: which estimate, which year

The Global Carbon Budget 2025 estimates that net CO2 emissions from land use averaged 5.0 ± 2.6 billion tonnes (GtCO2) a year in 2015–2024. Gross emissions from deforestation were around 1.9 billion tonnes of carbon a year, roughly 7 GtCO2 (carbon × 3.664 = CO2). Regrowth and reforestation offset about two-thirds of that. Preliminary data for 2025 put net land-use emissions at about 4.1 GtCO2.¹³ Brazil, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo were the largest net emitters in 2015–2024, together more than half of the global total.¹³

Global Forest Watch measures something narrower: the gross emissions from one year of tropical primary forest loss. For 2024, that was 3.1 gigatonnes of greenhouse gases, slightly more than India's annual CO2 from fossil fuels.⁶ WRI's 2025 release did not publish an emissions figure.

Wildlife: what lives in forests

Forests provide habitat for almost 5,000 amphibian species (80% of all known), close to 7,500 bird species (75%) and more than 3,700 mammal species (68%), according to FAO's State of the World's Forests 2020. Some 60% of all vascular plants are found in tropical forests.¹⁴ What that loss means for climate, water and people is on our page about the effects of deforestation.

Where "42 million trees a day" comes from

The film Deforestation opens with one number: 42 million trees cut down every day. It comes from a 2015 study in Nature by Crowther and colleagues, which produced the first global map of tree density.¹⁵

• The study estimated that about 3.04 trillion trees grow on Earth, and that the number of trees has fallen by roughly 46% since the start of human civilization.¹⁵
• It estimated that over 15 billion trees are cut down each year.¹⁵ Carbon Brief's report on the paper gives the figure as 15.3 billion.¹⁶
• The math: 15.3 billion ÷ 365 days = 41.9 million trees a day, rounded to 42 million. That is about 485 trees every second (41.9 million ÷ 86,400 seconds).

Two caveats matter. First, this is a gross figure. It counts every tree felled, including timber harvests and plantations that are replanted, not only deforestation. About 5 billion trees a year are added through regrowth and planting, which leaves a net loss of roughly 10 billion trees a year.¹⁶ That is still about 27 million trees a day (10 billion ÷ 365). Second, it is a modeled estimate built on data available in 2015, not an annual count.

How big is 10.9 million hectares in football pitches?

Hectares are hard to picture, so here is FAO's deforestation rate converted into football pitches, with every step shown.

1. Pitch size. FIFA recommends a field of play of 105 × 68 meters.¹⁷ That is 7,140 square meters, or 0.714 hectares.
2. Per year. 10,900,000 ha ÷ 0.714 ha ≈ 15.3 million pitches.
3. Per day. 10,900,000 ha ÷ 365 ≈ 29,900 ha a day, or about 41,800 pitches.
4. Per minute. 29,863 ha ÷ 1,440 minutes ≈ 20.7 ha, or about 29 pitches every minute.

Using FAO's net loss of 4.12 million hectares a year instead, the result is about 11 pitches a minute (4,120,000 ÷ 525,600 minutes ÷ 0.714). WRI's "more than 11 football fields per minute" describes a third measure, tropical primary forest loss in 2025,² so the similar-looking numbers are a coincidence, not a match.

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