An atlas of open data
Trees, forests and land: where we are heading. The latest open data, up to 2025, with their sources and their limits.
In 2025, trees disappeared from 25.5 million hectares worldwide. A hectare is a square of 100 by 100 metres, a little more than a football pitch.
Woodland is not always lost for good: after a fire or logging it often grows back. It is lost for good when fields, pastures or plantations take its place (brown in the chart): in 2025 that happened on 5.7 million hectares. The fastest-growing cause is fire: 2.5 million hectares in 2001, 11.1 in 2025, with a record 13.8 million in 2024.
The data come from Global Forest Watch satellites and count areas where trees covered at least 30% of the ground. Causes are estimated with a model: reliable for trends, not for a single field.
These are tropical forests that people have not cleared in recent times: the richest in species and carbon. In 2025, 4.3 million hectares were lost: 36% less than in 2024, the record year (6.7 million), when fires had burned 3.3. But that is still 46% more than ten years earlier.
Brazil is still the country losing the most: 1.6 million hectares, 42% less than in 2024.
Over the long run FAO, which measures forest area with national and satellite data, estimates that world deforestation fell from 17.6 million hectares a year in 1990–2000 to 10.9 in 2015–2025. FAO 2025
thousand hectares · in brackets the change from 2024
A forest is almost always cut down to produce something to sell. A study published in 2026 followed 184 products in 179 countries from 2001 to 2022. The result: 41% of the forest cleared made room for pasture for beef, and about two thirds of that loss happened in Brazil. Second come oilseeds (16%), mostly oil palm (9%) and soy (5%).
But soy does not mostly end up as tofu. 77% becomes animal feed: chickens and hens (37%), pigs (20%), farmed fish (6%). Only 7% is eaten directly by people. So behind part of the deforestation “for soy” there are also chicken, pork, eggs and milk.
As they grow, trees take carbon dioxide (CO₂) out of the air and turn it into wood, leaves and roots. According to Global Forest Watch, the world's forests remove on average 14.4 billion tonnes every year.
When they are cut or burned, that carbon goes back into the air: 11.9 billion tonnes in 2025, more than twice 2001 (5.0). For now forests remove more CO₂ from the air than they release. But if losses keep growing, this advantage shrinks.
Estimates from the Global Forest Watch model (Harris and colleagues, 2021, updated). Emissions also include woodland that later grows back. Uptake is an average of 2001–2025, not a year-by-year value.
Fields and pastures cover 47.7 million km², more than all the planet's forests (40.4 million km²). Since 1961 farmland has grown by 4.7 million km². For about twenty years the world total has barely moved: some regions abandon fields, while in the tropics forest is still cleared to make new ones.
Forests in this chart come from the World Bank series, which stops in 2022 and does not yet include FAO's 2025 revision (4.14 billion hectares).
Every year we burn oil, gas and coal and cut down forests. Over the last ten years, from 2015 to 2024, out of every 100 tonnes of CO₂ emitted about 48 stayed in the air. The rest, 22 billion tonnes a year on average, was absorbed by oceans, plants and soil. Without this help, CO₂ in the air would rise about 2.1 times faster.
Deforestation counts twice: it releases CO₂ and removes trees that would absorb it. Over the same years it emitted 5.0 billion tonnes a year on average, 12 out of every 100 emitted. With a simplified calculation, without that CO₂ the concentration in the air would rise about 12% more slowly: 0.31 ppm less each year, out of an average increase of 2.58 ppm (ppm means “parts per million”: how many CO₂ molecules there are in every million molecules of air).
How it is calculated: the CO₂ that stayed in the air comes from the increase measured every year at Mauna Loa, Hawaii (1 ppm is about 7.8 billion tonnes of CO₂, according to the Global Carbon Project). The absorbed CO₂ is the difference between what we emit and what stays in the air. Single years vary a lot because of the El Niño climate pattern and fires.
Pick two data series about the planet and see whether they move together. Careful: two things that both grow over time always look connected, even when they are not. So the page also runs a stricter test: when one changes from one year to the next, does the other change too?