- A new dataset and analysis released by World Resources Institute finds global tropical forest loss jumped to a record high in 2024, with 6.7 million hectares (16.6 million acres) worldwide.
- In total, the area of forest lost in 2024 is nearly the size of Panama.
- For the first time, fire, not agriculture, was the primary driver of primary tropical forest loss, with Latin America badly hit.
- Non-fire related tropical forest loss also increased, by 14%.
Tropical forest loss skyrocketed in 2024, with vast swaths of primary forest consumed by fire, according to new satellite data from the University of Maryland’s Global Land Analysis and Discovery (GLAD) laboratory, made available on World Resources Institute’s (WRI) Global Forest Watch (GFW) platform.
The data indicate a record 6.7 million hectares (16.6 million acres) of primary tropical forest was destroyed in 2024 — an area almost the size of Panama.
Nearly half of this forest loss was driven by fire, according to WRI’s analysis of the data. Five times more tropical forest burned in 2024 than in the previous year. That made fire, not agricultural expansion, the primary driver of tropical forest loss for the first time.
Non-fire related tropical forest loss was also up, by 14% compared with 2023.
“The 2024 numbers must be a wake-up call to every country, every bank, every international business,” Elizabeth Goldman, co-director of GFW said during a press conference. “Continuing down this path will devastate economies, people’s jobs and any chance of staving off climate change’s worst effects.”
In 2024, the Amazon experienced the worst drought — and fire season — in decades. Fires are normally rare in humid tropical ecosystems. But in hot dry conditions, agricultural fires, many lit to clear land, can quickly spread, driving forest loss in the Amazon and other parts of Latin America.
The data revealed that in the Congo Basin, shifting cultivation remained the primary driver of tropical forest loss, with rates of forest loss in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Republic of Congo climbing again in 2024.
On a more positive note, the data show that rates of forest loss dropped in parts of Southeast Asia, despite widespread drought.
Outside of the tropics, fires also ravaged boreal forests in Canada and Russia. Globally, the data reveal 30 million hectares (74.1 million acres) of tree cover were lost in 2024 — more than in any other year since GFW began collating land cover change data at the turn of the century. This resulted in 4.1 gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions, equivalent to more than four times the emissions from air travel in 2023, according to WRI.
Standing forests take in huge amounts of carbon and are at the forefront of mitigating the worst impacts of climate change. Forests are also a vital source of food, energy, medicines and more. They hold inestimable cultural value and are habitat for much of the world’s wildlife.
In 2021, world leaders from more than 140 countries signed the Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration, pledging to halt forest loss by 2030. However, of the 20 countries with the most primary forests, 17 had higher levels of forest loss in 2024 than when the declaration was signed. “We’re not limited by the information, actionable information, that these data provide. It’s the policy and governance side, to impact these trends, which I think is our shortfall,” Matt Hansen, co-director of the GLAD laboratory said in a press conference.
Brazil sees big increases in fire-related forest loss
Brazil has more tropical forest than any other country in the world. In 2024, fires caused massive destruction, resulting in six times more forest loss than during the previous year.
“Last year, Brazil experienced its most intense and widespread drought in seven decades, so combining this with high temperatures caused wildfires to spread on an unprecedented scale throughout the country,” Mariana Oliveira, forests and land use program manager at WRI Brasil, said in a press conference. “It was quite a hard year for us.”
Tropical forests in Brazil also continued to be cleared for cattle and soy, mostly illegally, according to WRI analysis. This was despite significant progress in 2023, with efforts by the administration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to reduce forest loss, such as recognition of Indigenous territories, improved law enforcement and the repealing of anti-environmental policy. Non-fire related forest loss was up by 13% compared with 2023 though remained below the peak rates of the early 2000s and under the 2019-22 presidency of Jair Bolsonaro.
Bolivia jumps to second place for absolute tropical forest loss
For the first time ever, Bolivia had the second-highest absolute amount of forest loss of any country in the world, losing three times more forest than in 2023, according to the data.
Fire was a major driver, as historic drought gripped the country. But non-fire related clearing also skyrocketed and was more than twice that of the previous year.
Government policies that deprioritized firefighting and encouraged agricultural expansion through tax breaks, loans and subsidies all played a role in the increase, according to WRI.
“Across the tropics, we need stronger fire response systems and a shift away from policies that encourage dangerous land clearing, or this pattern of destruction will only get worse,” Stasiek Czaplicki Cabezas, Bolivian researcher and data journalist for Revista Nómadas, said in a press release.
Fires also drove increases in forest loss elsewhere in Latin America, notably in Peru, Guyana, Mexico, Belize, Guatemala and Nicaragua.
In contrast, in Colombia, forest loss jumped by 50%, but fire was not a major cause. Instead, instability from a breakdown in peace talks and expansion of illegal coca farming and mining fueled the increase, according to WRI.
Some good news in Southeast Asia
Despite widespread drought, Indonesia managed to keep fires at bay and maintain progress on deforestation, with forest loss down 11% compared with 2023. That’s partly down to fire preparedness and response, with good collaboration between companies and communities, said Rod Taylor, global director of WRI’s Forests Program.
Nevertheless, primary forest loss was up in some areas, including those surrounding pulpwood fiber and oil palm plantations, mining and agricultural areas or previously deforested areas, pushing into protected areas.
Malaysia experienced a 13% drop in primary forest loss compared with 2023, a result of government efforts and corporate commitments to combat deforestation. Rates of forest loss in Laos dropped compared with 2023 but remained at the second-highest level in at least the past two decades. Agricultural expansion was the primary driver, partly linked to Chinese investment, according to WRI analysis.
Congo Basin sees forest loss rise in some countries, hold steady in others
In the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Republic of Congo, primary forest loss continued to climb, with a sharper rise in 2024 compared with previous years.
In the DRC, subsistence agriculture remained a major driver, though conflict, especially in eastern DRC, also led to increased forest clearance, with rebel control of charcoal production and mining, according to WRI. In the Republic of Congo, the data indicate forest loss more than doubled, with fire fueling nearly half of that loss.
However, elsewhere in the Congo Basin, the news was more positive. Forest loss rates remained stable in Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and the Central Africa Republic. In Cameroon, forest loss was down slightly in 2024 from a high in 2023.
Fire a growing global threat
Over the past two years, average annual global tree cover loss due to fires more than doubled compared with that of the previous two decades, according to Peter Potapov, research professor at the University of Maryland and co-director of the GLAD lab. The highest increases in fire activity have been in tropical and boreal forests, he said during a press conference, adding that these fires are now even burning remote intact landscapes, where there’s little sign of people.
Increases in burned areas are linked to human-caused climate change, according to a 2024 Nature Climate Change study. The past two years were the hottest on record.
Drought linked to El Niño events was associated with increases in fire in tropical forests in 2023-24, and in 2015-16, Potapov said. However, previous El Niño events did not have the same impact.
“We know that the temperature is set to rise and that drought events are probably set to be more frequent and more severe, plus we have other factors … fragmentation of intact and primary forests by infrastructure and mining activities that are expanding in the tropics all over, on all continents, and they contribute a lot to ignitions,” Potapov said.
The researchers call for tackling the root causes of climate change, and reducing the chances of ignitions in tropical forests.
“Reducing carbon emissions from all sources in the most important way to reduce the danger of forest fires in the future,” Potapov said. We also need to better protect intact primary forests, he added.
While there has been progress in reducing direct forest loss from commodities like palm oil and wood pulp, other products like coffee and cacao, and more recently, mining for critical minerals, are becoming a problem, Taylor said during a press conference.
“We need to have a kind of a broad land use planning approach to this issue, so that if one sector weans itself off deforestation, there isn’t another one ready to take its place,” Taylor said.
Banner image: A forest fire burns in Valparaíso, Chile, in February 2024. Image courtesy of the Gobierno de Chile via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0 CL)
Citation:
Burton, C., Lampe, S., Kelley, D. I., Thiery, W., Hantson, S., Christidis, N., Gudmundsson, L., Forrest, M., Burke, E., Chang, J., Huang, H., Ito, A., Kou-Giesbrecht, S., Lasslop, G., Li, W., Nieradzik, L., Li, F., Chen, Y., Randerson, J., Reyer, C. P. O., & Mengel, M. (2024). Global burned area increasingly explained by climate change. Nature Climate Change, 14, 1186–1192. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-024-02140-w This article was published on October 21, 2024, in Nature Climate Change, volume 14, pages 1186–1192.
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