It’s that time of year again. The US NGO World Resources Institute (WRI) has just released its annual figures on how much of the world’s tree cover and tropical primary forest in particular were lost last year and, unsurprisingly, the news is not good. Yes, it was significantly less than in 2024, as some of the immediate media reporting has highlighted, but that isn’t saying much given that last year was the worst ever recorded.
4.3 million hectares of tropical primary forest disappeared in 2025, according to WRI’s Global Forest Watch (GFW) platform, which constitutes a 36% drop from the previous year but is still 46% higher than a decade ago. Particularly sobering: more tropical primary forest was lost last year than in almost any other year since 2002, apart from 2024, 2017 and 2016. The top 10 countries - from number one to ten - include most of the usual suspects: Brazil, Bolivia, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Indonesia, Peru, Cameroon, Madagascar, Colombia, Laos and Malaysia.
“A drop of this scale in a single year is encouraging - it shows what decisive government action can achieve,” GFW’s co-director Elizabeth Goldman is quoted saying in an WRI press release. “But part of the decline reflects a lull after an extreme fire year. Fires and climate change are feeding off each other.”
Goldman tells me that the most surprising aspect of GFW’s new findings is “the continued decline in Brazil.” Although it still lost far more tropical primary forest than any other country - over 1.6 million hectares - that is down from almost three million hectares in 2024, while its non-fire primary forest loss is the lowest recorded.
“[This] shows that electing leaders who care about forests can have a real and rapid impact - but also how fragile that progress is,” Goldman says. “A single election or a bad weather year can undo years of gains. Ultimately, it underscores the need for sustained commitment to protect forests and the benefits they provide for future generations.”
In percentage terms, things were worse in neighbouring Bolivia. Although Brazil lost almost three times the amount of tropical primary forest, that constitutes almost 0.5% of the country’s total, whereas Bolivia lost more than 1.5% of its total. The under-reported deforestation crisis in that country was the subject of a documentary film I co-presented, Bolivia Burning, which was made by The Gecko Project and released last year.
Worst of all in percentage terms, though, is Madagascar, a new entry in the top ten. It lost just under 100,000 hectares of tropical primary forest in 2025 - roughly 1.9% of its total.
GFW concludes that in 2025 globally all tree cover loss - i.e. not just tropical primary forest, but “primary, secondary, managed and planted forests, as well as tree crops and agroforestry systems”, according to Goldman - came to a massive 25.5 million hectares. That is less than in 2024, 2023, 2020, 2017 and 2016, but more than in 2022, 2021, 2019, 2018 and every year between 2001 and 2015.
25.5 million hectares is equivalent to an area larger than the UK. According to GFW, the two countries with the most tree cover loss were Canada (6.2 million hectares) and Russia (3.2 million), followed by Brazil (2.8 million), the USA (1.5 million), Indonesia and the DRC.
Among other things, what this means is that the world is a long, long way off its 2030 target of stopping and reversing forest loss - a commitment made by more than 140 countries during the UN climate change conference, “COP26”, held in Glasgow in 2021. According to GFW, deforestation last year was 70% higher than required if that end-of-decade “zero deforestation” goal is to be met.
What might Goldman say to the leaders of some of those countries if she could talk to them about GFW’s latest findings? That the biggest driver of tropical forest loss is “still agricultural expansion”, she says, and the most effective step governments can take is to “make it easier and more profitable for farmers to use the land they already have, rather than clearing new forest - by supporting smallholders to improve yields, adopt sustainable practices, rehabilitate degraded land, and linking subsidies to those outcomes.”
“At the same time, governments need to enforce existing restrictions on clearing and close markets to commodities linked to deforestation,” Goldman tells me. “The EU Deforestation Regulation is a step in the right direction, but it needs to hold firm, and more countries must adopt similar rules to prevent deforestation simply shifting elsewhere.”
Goldman also cites the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) as a potential solution. “Protecting forests requires long-term commitment backed by money,” she says. “The TFFF offers a new model to reward countries for keeping forests standing, but it will only work if donor countries step up with the initial seed funding this year. This is a modest investment in national budget terms, with potentially huge benefits - and 2026 will be a make-or-break moment for that mechanism.”