Deforestation is the clearing, conversion or degradation of forest land, most consequentially in the tropics, where forests hold the greatest concentration of biodiversity and stored carbon. Only about a third of the world's remaining forests are still primary — old-growth, structurally intact — and that share keeps shrinking.
In 2024, the tropics lost 6.7 million hectares of primary rainforest — the highest annual total on record, an 80% increase over 2023.
Source: Global Forest Watch; World Resources Institute, 2025For the first time on record, wildfire — not agriculture directly — was the single largest driver of tropical primary forest loss in 2024, accounting for close to half of the destruction, as fire regimes shift under a warming climate.
One-third of all global forest lost between 2001 and 2024 is considered permanent — in tropical primary rainforest specifically, 61% of loss is tied to permanent land-use change rather than temporary disturbance.
Source: World Resources Institute, 2025Fire's recent surge doesn't erase the underlying, longer-running driver: agriculture. Between 90% and 99% of all tropical deforestation is linked directly or indirectly to farming — overwhelmingly concentrated in three commodities.
Figures describe share of tropical deforestation/loss attributed to each driver in recent assessments; drivers overlap and are not mutually exclusive. Source: Our World in Data; Global Forest Watch, 2025.
Cattle pasture expansion alone accounts for roughly 41% of tropical deforestation — about 2.1 million hectares per year — making it the single largest driver worldwide.
Source: Our World in Data, 2025Permanent loss is the more consequential figure here, and the one most easily missed. Annual loss totals capture area cleared in a given year, but they don't distinguish forest that will regenerate from forest converted permanently to pasture or cropland — the latter is what drives long-term biodiversity and carbon decline, and it's the number policy should be judged against.
Policy responses exist, but implementation has repeatedly slipped — worth tracking as a live situation.
Satellite-based measurement of tree cover loss is well established and high-confidence. Greater uncertainty surrounds attribution — separating fire, agriculture, logging and natural disturbance in any given cleared area — and long-term projections, such as estimates that up to 90% of some temperate rainforest types could be lost by 2100, which depend heavily on emissions and land-use assumptions that remain contested.