The health of the earth’s forests is deteriorating and remains in crisis worldwide as countries are off track on halting and reversing deforestation by 2030, according to the Forest Declaration Assessment 2025.
The report comes at the halfway point in the decade of ambitious forest pledges for which 2025 was meant to be a turning point. It highlighted that deforestation rates continue to escalate. The world is off track to zero down on deforestation by 2030 as nearly 8.1 million hectares of forest were wiped out in 2024 alone.
These figures exceeded the annual target of five million hectares. They were three million hectares higher than what was pledged by world leaders to eliminate deforestation and forest degradation and restore 30 per cent of all degraded ecosystems—including forests— by 2030.
These commitments were made during the New York Declaration on Forests in 2014, the Glasgow Leaders’Declaration on Forests and Land Use 2021, and reaffirmed in the First Global Stocktake in 2023 under the Paris Agreement. In 2024, it was again committed to in the declaration of the high-level segment of the nineteenth session of the United Nations Forum on Forests.
The loss of irreplaceable humid tropical primary forest accounted for 6.7 million hectares, releasing 3.1 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases—nearly 150 per cent of the annual emissions from the United States energy sector, the report said.
Permanent agriculture such as oil palm, cacao, orchards, nuts, rubber, seasonal crops, and pasture remained the primary driver of deforestation worldwide, contributing to 86 per cent of deforestation in the past decade. The report also warned that forest degradation is escalating, with 8.8 million hectares of tropical moist forest being degraded in 2024.
The land area degraded is more than double, putting the annual average goals decided to stop degradation by 2030 off track by 235 per cent.
The analysis noted that wildfires were the major contributor for degradation of forests, with the Amazon Basin particularly hard-hit by fire-induced degradation. The greenhouses gases emitted in 2024 through wildfires amounted to 791 million metric tonnes and exceeded industrial emissions of a country like Germany.
The report said the Amazon basin is a strong example of how anthropogenic climate change and poor forest management practices can lead natural disturbances into becoming co-drivers of ecosystem collapse.
Yet degradation remains a blind spot in national targets and monitoring systems, particularly outside tropical regions, it added.
Despite accelerating deforestation and degradation, efforts for forests restoration remain low with an estimated 10.6 million hectares being covered by restoration projects. The report observed that the majority of governments are failing to align their economic, trade and land-use policies with regard to forest goals.
Moreover, voluntary corporate pledges are far from curbing forest and ecosystem loss at scale with less than one-third of agricultural and forestry companies analysed in the report covering all forest-risk commodities to which they are exposed.
Only three per cent of assessed companies are implementing strong deforestation commitments as expected, the report said.
It noted that the mining sector poses a rapidly increasing threat to forests because of increasing energy demands. Estimates show that 77 per cent of global mines are located less than 50 km from Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs).
In 2023-24, forest loss from forested KBAs increased by 47 per cent, with 2.17 million hectares of forested KBAs lost. This put the world 104 per cent off track towards to zero tree cover loss by 2030.
Environmental crime, including illegal deforestation and logging, generates as much as $281 billion annually. Estimates suggest that between 61 per cent and 94 per cent of tropical deforestation for agriculture is illegal, the report observed.
Recognition of Indigenous Peoples (IPs) and Local Communities’ (LCs) rights remains the exception, not the norm, with only 13 per cent of customary lands in tropical forests formally recognised, it said.