World’s Forests ‘Still in Crisis’ Halfway to Deadline to End Deforestation: Report
“The 2025 Forest Declaration Assessment is out and can broadly be summarized as, ‘We suck,’” said one climate scientist.
An aerial view shows a large swath of the Amazon rainforest deforested by illegal fire in the municipality of Labrea, Amazonas State, Brazil, on August 20, 2024.
(Photo by Evaristo Sa/AFP via Getty Images)
Brett Wilkins
Oct 14, 2025
COMMON DREAMS
“The 2025 Forest Declaration Assessment is out and can broadly be summarized as, ‘We suck,’” said one climate scientist.
An aerial view shows a large swath of the Amazon rainforest deforested by illegal fire in the municipality of Labrea, Amazonas State, Brazil, on August 20, 2024.
(Photo by Evaristo Sa/AFP via Getty Images)
Brett Wilkins
Oct 14, 2025
COMMON DREAMS
The world’s governments are falling far short of their goal to tackle forest destruction by the end of the decade, according to a key annual report published Monday.
At the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP26, in Scotland, 145 countries adopted the Forest Declaration, pledging to end deforestation and forest degradation and restore 30% of all degraded ecosystems by 2030.
Annual Forest Declaration Assessment reports—which are published by a coalition of dozens of NGOs—track progress toward achieving the objectives established at COP29. Although stopping and reversing deforestation by 2030 is crucial to averting the worst consequences of the climate and biodiversity crises, every annual report has highlighted how the world is failing to adequately protect its forests.
This year is no different. According to the 2025 Forest Declaration Assessment, “in 2024, forests continued to experience large-scale destruction, with nearly 8.1 million hectares permanently lost globally.”
“Primary tropical forests continue to be cleared at alarming rates, with 6.73 million hectares lost last year alone, releasing 3.1 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases,” the report continues. “Losses in forested Key Biodiversity Areas reached 2.2 million hectares, up 47% from the previous year, threatening irreplaceable habitats.”
The assessment notes:
Deforestation remains overwhelmingly driven by clearance for permanent agriculture, accounting for an average of about 86% of global deforestation over the past decade, with other drivers such as mining exerting growing pressure. Because deforestation commodities are both consumed domestically and exported internationally, deforestation represents a systemic problem; national land-use policies and practices are deeply intertwined with global demand. This highlights the urgent need for structural change in how production and trade are regulated, monitored, and ultimately governed.
Furthermore, according to the report, “financial flows are still grossly misaligned with forest goals, with harmful subsidies outweighing green subsidies by over 200:1,” and “despite new pledges, the flow of funds to forest countries and local actors remains far below what’s necessary to deliver on 2030 goals.”
“‘Global forests remain in crisis’ is not the headline we hoped to write in 2025,” the publication states. “As the halfway point in the decade of ambitious forest pledges, this year was meant to be a turning point. Despite the indispensable role of forests, the verdict is clear: We are off track.”
The news isn’t all bad—the report highlights how “restoration efforts are expanding, with at least 10.6 million hectares hosting forest restoration projects worldwide. But global data remain too fragmented to determine whether the world is recovering forests at the scale required.”
The assessment offers the following recommendations for policymakers:Governments must act to value forests, including through regulations and pricing in the real cost of deforestation;
Action must become integrated, not siloed, as the climate emergency, biodiversity crisis, and social inequality are all interconnected; and
Decision-making must be inclusive and participatory, as rapid progress toward 2030 forest goals requires the participation of Indigenous peoples, local communities, women, and civil society.
“At the halfway point to 2030, the world should be seeing a steep decline in deforestation,” the assessment says. “Instead, the global deforestation curve has not begun to bend.”
The new Forest Declaration Assessment comes ahead of next month’s UN climate conference, or COP30, in Belém, located in the Brazilian Amazon.
“This COP30 is extremely crucial for us to move these pledges to actions,” Sassan Saatchi, founder of the non-profit CTrees and a former NASA scientist, told Climate Home News on Tuesday.
“The nice thing about COP30 being in Belém,” Saatchi added, “is that there is a recognition that the Global South has really come forward to say: ’We are going to solve the climate problem, even though we may not have been historically the cause of this climate change.‘”
At the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP26, in Scotland, 145 countries adopted the Forest Declaration, pledging to end deforestation and forest degradation and restore 30% of all degraded ecosystems by 2030.
Annual Forest Declaration Assessment reports—which are published by a coalition of dozens of NGOs—track progress toward achieving the objectives established at COP29. Although stopping and reversing deforestation by 2030 is crucial to averting the worst consequences of the climate and biodiversity crises, every annual report has highlighted how the world is failing to adequately protect its forests.
This year is no different. According to the 2025 Forest Declaration Assessment, “in 2024, forests continued to experience large-scale destruction, with nearly 8.1 million hectares permanently lost globally.”
“Primary tropical forests continue to be cleared at alarming rates, with 6.73 million hectares lost last year alone, releasing 3.1 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases,” the report continues. “Losses in forested Key Biodiversity Areas reached 2.2 million hectares, up 47% from the previous year, threatening irreplaceable habitats.”
The assessment notes:
Deforestation remains overwhelmingly driven by clearance for permanent agriculture, accounting for an average of about 86% of global deforestation over the past decade, with other drivers such as mining exerting growing pressure. Because deforestation commodities are both consumed domestically and exported internationally, deforestation represents a systemic problem; national land-use policies and practices are deeply intertwined with global demand. This highlights the urgent need for structural change in how production and trade are regulated, monitored, and ultimately governed.
Furthermore, according to the report, “financial flows are still grossly misaligned with forest goals, with harmful subsidies outweighing green subsidies by over 200:1,” and “despite new pledges, the flow of funds to forest countries and local actors remains far below what’s necessary to deliver on 2030 goals.”
“‘Global forests remain in crisis’ is not the headline we hoped to write in 2025,” the publication states. “As the halfway point in the decade of ambitious forest pledges, this year was meant to be a turning point. Despite the indispensable role of forests, the verdict is clear: We are off track.”
The news isn’t all bad—the report highlights how “restoration efforts are expanding, with at least 10.6 million hectares hosting forest restoration projects worldwide. But global data remain too fragmented to determine whether the world is recovering forests at the scale required.”
The assessment offers the following recommendations for policymakers:Governments must act to value forests, including through regulations and pricing in the real cost of deforestation;
Action must become integrated, not siloed, as the climate emergency, biodiversity crisis, and social inequality are all interconnected; and
Decision-making must be inclusive and participatory, as rapid progress toward 2030 forest goals requires the participation of Indigenous peoples, local communities, women, and civil society.
“At the halfway point to 2030, the world should be seeing a steep decline in deforestation,” the assessment says. “Instead, the global deforestation curve has not begun to bend.”
The new Forest Declaration Assessment comes ahead of next month’s UN climate conference, or COP30, in Belém, located in the Brazilian Amazon.
“This COP30 is extremely crucial for us to move these pledges to actions,” Sassan Saatchi, founder of the non-profit CTrees and a former NASA scientist, told Climate Home News on Tuesday.
“The nice thing about COP30 being in Belém,” Saatchi added, “is that there is a recognition that the Global South has really come forward to say: ’We are going to solve the climate problem, even though we may not have been historically the cause of this climate change.‘”
By AFP
October 13, 2025
Globally, deforestation is driven overwhelmingly by the expansion of agriculture. - Copyright AFP Lillian SUWANRUMPHA
Deforestation “has not meaningfully declined” despite a global pledge to halt forest destruction, but next month’s UN climate summit in the Amazon could mark a turning point, experts said Tuesday.
Last year an area of the world’s forests larger than Scotland was cleared primarily to make way for agriculture, according to an annual deforestation assessment by a broad global coalition of researchers and activists.
Tropical primary forests — particularly carbon rich and ecologically biodiverse environments — were the hardest hit, with 6.7 million hectares (16.6 million acres) lost in 2024.
The report also highlighted persistent but overlooked levels of forest degradation, where land is damaged but not razed entirely, mostly owing to logging, road building and fires lit to clear land.
Rates of deforestation remain stubbornly high despite a commitment made by more than 140 leaders at the UN COP summit in 2021 to stamp it out by the end of the decade.
“Deforestation has not meaningfully declined since the beginning of the decade, and we’re already halfway through,” Erin Matson, an expert at the Climate Focus think tank and co-author of the latest assessment, told reporters.
“Every year we are losing this level of forests.”
Deforestation worldwide in 2024 was 3.1 million hectares above the maximum possible level to align with meeting the 2030 goal, the report said.
Globally, deforestation is overwhelmingly driven by the expansion of permanent agriculture, which accounted for 85 percent of all forest loss over the past decade.
“But another important and growing driver is mining and extractives for gold, for coal, and increasingly for the metals and minerals required for the renewable energy transition,” Matson said.
– ‘Forest COP’ –
Matson said she was cautiously optimistic the cause could be revived at next month’s COP30 summit in Brazil, the first time the annual UN climate conference has been held in the Amazon region.
“This is the forest COP. I think there’s a lot of opportunity there,” she said.
Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva chose to host the world’s most important climate talks in Belem, the gateway to the Amazon, to spotlight the role of forests in absorbing carbon dioxide.
At COP30, Brazil will launch an innovative new fund that rewards countries with high tropical forest cover — mostly developing nations in Asia, Africa and Latin America — that protect trees rather than chopping them down.
The Tropical Forests Forever Fund (TFFF) aims to raise up to $25 billion from donor countries and another $100 billion from the private sector, which is invested on financial markets. Brazil has already thrown in $1 billion.
“What is new about this initiative… it’s the scale, it’s the simplicity, it’s the long-term vision, and it’s the leadership of the Global South,” said Elisabeth Hoch, international portfolio lead from the Climate and Company, a think tank.
“From a political point of view, the initiative has a lot of value but it has not yet reached a stage of maturity sufficient to be fully launched,” said a French government source on Friday.
Matson said “political courage” was needed at COP30 to correct course and put the fight for forests back on the global agenda.
“Looking at the global picture of deforestation, it is dark, but we may be in the darkness before the dawn,” she said.
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