Governments are far off track to meet a global target to end deforestation by 2030, according to a progress assessment. Experts say the report is a wake-up call ahead of COP30 next month, which will be the first UN climate summit held in the Amazon rainforest.
At COP26 in 2021, more than 140 countries adopted a pledge, known as the Forest Declaration, to halt and reverse forest loss and land degradation by the end of the decade. Two years later at COP28, all the world’s governments reaffirmed this commitment as part of the first global stocktake of national climate plans.
But on Tuesday, an annual review by NGOs and research institutions showed that, instead of advancing towards the goal, countries will have to close a widening gap in the next five years – as deforestation is 63% higher than where it needs to be to reach zero by 2030.
In 2024 alone, the world permanently lost an area of forests roughly the size of England – about 8.1 million hectares. To be on track to stop forest loss by 2030, no more than 5 million hectares should have been deforested globally in 2024, the report says.
“In order to reach zero deforestation by 2030, we would have to cut (forest loss) by 10% each year,” Erin Matson, lead author of the report and a senior consultant at Climate Focus, told journalists. “So far, we are failing to keep pace with that trajectory.”
The report shows that permanent deforestation occurred mostly in the tropics, where old-growth primary forests are being cleared at alarming rates. About 6.7 million hectares were lost in 2024, which released about 3.1 billion metric tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere.
Because of the long timescales over which such high-value forest ecosystems develop, Matson warned that “these carbon and biodiversity-rich forests will not recover in our lifetimes”.
What is driving forest loss?
According to the Forest Declaration Assessment, the main driver for forest loss in the tropics across all regions is the expansion of agriculture, which results in primary forests being converted to permanent pastures or plantations.
A separate 2024 analysis by the World Resources Institute showed cattle has been the main commodity replacing rainforests in key biodiverse regions – including Brazil, which will host COP30 in November.
“Demand for commodities like soy, beef, timber, coal and metals keeps rising – but the tragedy is that we don’t actually need to destroy forests to meet that demand. There are more sustainable production models, but the incentives are completely backwards,” Matson said.
A 2024 report by NGO Global Canopy revealed that a quarter of the top companies and financial institutions exposed to deforestation in their supply chains did not have a policy to prevent forest loss from their activities.
Additionally, in Latin America, wildfires were responsible for a staggering 133% jump in forest loss from the previous year. Fuelled by severe drought, fires in 2024 consumed an area the size of California in the Brazilian Amazon alone – a 66% increase from 2023, according to MapBiomas.
“Major fire years used to be outliers but now they’re the norm. These fires are largely human-made. They’re linked to land clearing, to climate change-induced drought and to limited law enforcement,” Matson added.
Experts told Climate Home in August that the spike in wildfires could threaten forest conservation initiatives in Brazil, including carbon-offsetting projects and state-level forest protection projects in Pará, one of the Brazilian Amazon states with the highest deforestation rates where the COP will take place.
Amazon COP ‘crucial’ for action
As delegates from all countries prepare to gather in the city of Belém for the first UN climate summit held in the Amazon rainforest, experts told Climate Home that clear political signals to reverse the deforestation trend are desperately needed at the midpoint of the Forest Declaration decade.
“This COP30 is extremely crucial for us to move these pledges to actions,” said Sassan Saatchi, founder of the non-profit CTrees and a former NASA scientist.
“The nice thing about COP30 being in Belém is that there is a recognition that the Global South has really come forward to say: ‘We are going to solve the climate problem, even though we may not have been historically the cause of this climate change’,” Saatchi added.
Brazil pledges $1bn in first contribution to COP30 rainforest fund
Brazil has vowed to place rainforests at the centre of the upcoming climate conference, and has proposed a flagship new initiative called the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) – a new fund to finance forest protection in tropical countries by leveraging the financial markets.
Many countries have backed Brazil’s push to raise more funding for forest protection, as the TFFF has been endorsed by the BRICS group of large emerging economies and a coalition of 34 nations behind a new forest finance framework including potential TFFF donors like Norway, Japan, the UK and Canada.
Still, Matson urged countries to work on improving and fully implementing their forest policies, rather than taking on new commitments at COP30. “COP is just where things get showcased, but it’s not where the work actually happens, beyond the negotiating room,” she said.
