More tropical forests fall while the UK stalls - still no legislation in force
Further reports published on global deforestation crisis but the UK fails to act
Bad news about the devastation of the world’s tropical forests just keeps rolling in, some more enthusiastically than others. For example, in January the UK government - following a Freedom of Information request - somewhat reluctantly published a “national security assessment” warning of “ecosystem collapse” in both the Amazon and Congo basins by 2050, and then in April the US-based NGO World Resources Institute (WRI) released figures showing that 2025 was one of the worst years for tropical forest loss - 4.3 million hectares! - since 2002. The previous year, according to WRI, was the worst year ever.
The following month, the United Nations’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs released its “Global Forest Goals Report 2026.” Despite some progress made towards the majority of 26 targets - seven of them met, 17 partially met - “Target 1.1” to increase the global forest area by 3% by 2030 is spectacularly off-track. Between 2015 and 2025, according to the report, there was a decrease of about 40 million hectares - “close to one per cent.”
That’s to say, we’re going in the wrong direction. “These losses were most pronounced in South America and Africa,” states the report, released at the UN Forum on Forests in New York. “The global loss of forest between 2015 and 2025 included the loss of 16 million ha of primary forests, which are of particular importance for biodiversity. Much forest loss is attributable to pressures from agriculture.”
Just a few days after that, the Dutch NGO Profundo joined the chorus too, publishing a 182-page report calling tropical deforestation “one of the most pressing environmental challenges of our time, with wide-reaching impacts on biodiversity, water cycles, climate stability, and the livelihoods of millions that depend on healthy ecosystems. . . Tropical rainforests have already lost 830,000 km2 (8.1%) of their area since 2002,” the report states, “and there is no persistent trend reversal in sight.”
The NGO Rainforest Foundation Norway (RFN), which commissioned Profundo’s research, said in a media statement that “tropical forests are being sacrificed to produce food, fuel, electric cars, fast fashion, paper and gold. Without significant changes in how these raw materials are extracted, produced, and ultimately consumed, forests will continue to be converted at scale into plantations and extraction sites. Current trajectories are catastrophic.”
Despite all this, the UK government is failing to operationalise legislation to curb the UK’s complicity in the global deforestation crisis. It has been failing to do that for almost five years now. In late 2021 the Environment Act received Royal Assent, but the section on so-called “forest risk commodities” has never come into law because the secondary legislation required to enact it hasn’t been introduced.
In other words, while the world’s tropical forests continue to fall - for beef and leather, soy beans, palm oil, cocoa, coffee, rubber, timber, gold etc - the UK continues to stall.
And calls for the UK to act continue to be made too. The Profundo report is explicit that governments - whether in producer countries like Brazil and Indonesia, or consumer countries like the UK - hold the “decisive lever to halt the further loss of tropical rainforests”, although it also acknowledged the need for the corporate and financial sectors to take effective action too - not just make pledges or commit to certification schemes.
Along with the EU, the US and China, the UK is one of the major markets identified by Profundo. The Dutch NGO’s report notes how the “UK Forest Risk Commodity Regulation”, as it calls the relevant section of the 2021 Environment Act, has not only still not been implemented, but needs to be drastically improved too.
“The law was criticised by CSOs [civil society organisations] and forest scientists for its focus on illegal deforestation, which does not cover deforestation that is legal under local regulations but can account for a significant share of forest loss, and for its limited scope of high-risk commodities, which currently excludes coffee, rubber and timber,” Profundo states.
The UK also came in for special mention from the Oxford-based NGO Global Canopy, which released its annual “Forest 500” report in April, not long before the WRI’s analysis was published. The central thrust of their findings was more upbeat than the other publications - namely, that the prospect of the incoming European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) has stirred some companies to act.
“This year’s data presents clear signs that the EUDR – even in a delayed and diluted form – has already steered business expectations, galvanised investment and driven supply chain action by some of the most influential companies in the deforestation economy,” Global Canopy states.
Their report features various recommendations to the UK, which include bringing in the secondary legislation as a “matter of urgency”, considering improving the primary legislation so it applies to “all forms of deforestation” and “all forest risk commodities”, and “explicitly address[ing] human rights abuses connected to deforestation in UK law.” Any response to that from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA)? Just the same-old canned statement they’ve been putting about for years: “we recognise the need to take action to ensure that UK consumption of forest risk commodities is not driving deforestation, and we will set out the next steps on this in due course.”