The pace of tropical forest destruction slowed in 2025 after record losses the year before but remained at worrying levels equivalent to 11 football fields per minute, researchers said on Wednesday.
The world lost 4.3 million hectares (10.6 million acres) of tropical primary rainforest last year, down 36 percent from 2024, said researchers from the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the University of Maryland.
"A drop of this scale in a single year is encouraging, it shows what decisive government action can achieve," said Elizabeth Goldman, co-director of WRI's Global Forest Watch platform.
"But part of the decline reflects a lull after an extreme fire year," Goldman said.
The researchers also warned that fires fueled by climate change have become a "dangerous new normal," which threaten to reverse the recent gains made by government efforts to tackle deforestation.
The researchers, who used satellite data for their report, noted that last year's forest loss was still significant, about the size of Denmark and 46 percent higher than a decade ago.
Despite last year's progress, global forest loss remains 70 percent above the level required to meet the 2030 goal of halting and reversing forest loss, the researchers said.
"A good year is a good year, but you need good years forever if you're going to conserve, for example, the tropical rainforest," Matthew Hansen, director of the GLAD Lab at the University of Maryland, said in a media briefing.
Much of last year's slowdown was due to sharp declines in Brazil, home to the biggest rainforest in the world.
Brazil's forest loss, excluding fires, was 41 percent lower than in 2024, its lowest rate on record.
"Brazil's declines are associated with stronger environmental policies and enforcement since President Lula took office in 2023," Goldman said in a news briefing.
