Deforestation

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Deforestation is the removal and destruction of a forest or stand of trees from land that is then converted to non-forest use. Right now, somewhere on Earth, about 2,400 trees are falling every minute. Not from storms, not from age, but from deliberate clearing. That pace adds up to a loss that has already stripped away one-third of the planet's original forest cover, with half of that vanishing in just the last century. Roughly 31% of Earth's land surface remains forested today. What is driving that relentless shrinkage? Who bears the costs when a forest disappears? And what, if anything, can stop it? Those are the questions this documentary will work through.

• 2. Agriculture's Dominance

  ›

  In 2025, nearly 90% of global deforestation was caused by agriculture, up from more than 80% in 2012. Cropland expansion and pasture creation are the primary drivers. Large-scale commercial agriculture, primarily cattle ranching and cultivation of soya bean and oil palm, accounted for 40% of tropical deforestation between 2000 and 2010. Local subsistence agriculture added another 33%. Forests are being converted to plantations for coffee, tea, palm oil, rice, rubber and various other products, as rising demand and global trade arrangements push the frontier of clearing ever deeper. In the Amazon, the connection is especially stark: consumption patterns in G7 countries are estimated to cause an average loss of 3.9 trees per person per year through imported commodities like coffee. About 80% of all converted Amazon land goes to cattle ranching. 91% of Amazon land deforested since 1970 has been turned over to cattle. Brazil has become the world's largest exporter of beef at the same time that the Amazon is being cleared, and the two facts are not coincidental. The slash-and-burn method, long practiced by subsistence farmers in tropical regions, compounds this pressure. Farmers cut and burn small plots, exploit the nutrients in the ash, then move on as yields decline and fallow periods shorten. On small local plots the cycle was once sustainable; at larger scales, it degrades the land and leaves behind soils that grow less and less over time.

• 3. Forests in Freefall

  ›

  Since 1990, an estimated 420 million hectares of forest have been lost through conversion to other land uses, an area roughly the size of Libya. The world has lost 178 million hectares of forest since 1990 by one measure, and a separate estimate puts the total even higher at 489 million hectares depending on the period and method used. The rate of deforestation has slowed compared to the 1990s, when it ran at roughly 17.6 million hectares per year, but the annual losses remain enormous. In the period 2015-2025, the rate was estimated at 10.9 million hectares per year. Tropical regions bear the heaviest share. In 2019, nearly a third of all tree cover loss, or 3.8 million hectares, occurred within humid tropical primary forests. That loss is equivalent to a football pitch of primary forest disappearing every six seconds. More than half of all plant and land animal species in the world live in tropical forests, making these losses disproportionate in biological terms. By 2015, it was estimated that about half of the mature tropical forests that existed as of 1947 had already been destroyed. The area of primary forest worldwide has decreased by over 80 million hectares since 1990. Africa recorded the largest annual rate of net forest loss in 2010-2020, at 3.9 million hectares, followed by South America at 2.6 million hectares. In contrast, Asia gained forest area between 1990 and 2025, and Europe also recorded net gains over the same period, though both regions saw their rate of gain slow in the most recent decade.

• 4. Climate, Fire, and Feedback

  ›

  Emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, excluding peatland emissions, contribute about 12% of total anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, with estimates ranging from 6% to 17%. Annual carbon emissions from tropical deforestation have doubled over the last two decades, rising from 0.97 petagrams of carbon per year in 2001-2005 to 1.99 petagrams per year in 2015-2019. Standing tropical forests help cool the average global temperature by more than 1 degree Celsius, according to one review. Climate change does not simply receive what deforestation produces; it also feeds back into deforestation itself. Wildfires, insect outbreaks, invasive species, and more frequent extreme weather events all increase forest loss. 23% of tree cover losses result from wildfires, and rising temperatures make those fires more frequent and more powerful, especially in boreal forests. In 2023, massive wildfires in Canada, exacerbated by climate change, contributed to a 24% increase in global tree cover loss. A study examining tropical, arid and temperate forests found a significant decline in resilience in those ecosystems, probably linked to increased water limitations and climate variability. Logged and structurally degraded tropical forests function as carbon sources for at least a decade, even while recovering, because of larger carbon losses from soil organic matter and deadwood. The carbon sink that healthy tropical forests provide may therefore be much smaller than previously estimated.

• 5. Water, Soil, and Health

  ›

  Trees extract groundwater through their roots and release it into the atmosphere. When part of a forest is removed, the trees no longer transpire this water, resulting in a much drier local climate. Deforested areas become sources of surface water runoff that moves faster than subsurface flows, translating into flash flooding and more localized floods. Tropical rainforests produce about 30% of Earth's fresh water, and in deforested areas of north and northwest China, average annual precipitation decreased by one-third between the 1950s and the 1980s. The soil also degrades. In a simulation of Amazon deforestation, researchers found that surface and soil temperatures increased by 1 to 3 degrees Celsius, demonstrating the loss of the soil's capacity to absorb radiation and moisture. The rate of erosion around deforested areas runs at about 2 metric tons per square kilometre. Deforestation in China's Loess Plateau has driven erosion that widened valleys and floods the Yellow River with so much sediment that the river takes on its distinctive color. The human health toll is less visible but substantial. A 2025 pan-tropical analysis estimated that local warming from tropical deforestation between 2001 and 2020 exposed approximately 345 million people and was associated with roughly 28,330 additional heat-related deaths per year, accounting for about one-third of heat-attributable mortality in areas of forest loss, with the highest rates in Southeast Asia. Deforestation also eliminates species that act as buffers between humans and zoonotic diseases. Forest-associated diseases include malaria, Chagas disease, sleeping sickness, leishmaniasis, Lyme disease, HIV and Ebola. In Kenya, deforestation has led to an increase in malaria cases, which is now the leading cause of morbidity and mortality in the country. The World Economic Forum has estimated that 31% of emerging diseases are linked to deforestation.

• 6. History's Long Clearing

  ›

  The Carboniferous Rainforest Collapse, an event that occurred 300 million years ago, offers the deepest context for what forests can lose to climate change. Cooler, drier conditions fragmented tropical rainforests into shrinking islands, devastating populations like the sub-class Lissamphibia while organisms better adapted to drier conditions survived. Human-driven clearing began far more recently. The first evidence of deforestation appears in the Mesolithic period, probably used to convert closed forests into more open ecosystems favorable to game animals. Stone axes were being made from about 3000 BC not just from flint but from a wide variety of hard rocks from across Britain and North America. From 1100 to 1500 AD, significant deforestation took place in Western Europe as a result of expanding population. Each of Nelson's Royal Navy warships at Trafalgar in 1805 required 6,000 mature oaks for its construction. Efforts to stop deforestation have a history of their own. In Tonga, paramount rulers developed policies to prevent conflicts between short-term gains and long-term forest loss. During the 17th and 18th centuries in Tokugawa Japan, the shoguns built a sophisticated system of long-term planning to stop and reverse deforestation by substituting timber with other products and managing farmland more efficiently. In 16th-century Germany, landowners developed silviculture to address the problem directly. Global deforestation sharply accelerated around 1852. Much of the greatest modern loss came between 1960 and 1990, when 20% of all tropical rainforests were destroyed.

• 7. Policy and Resistance

  ›

  In 2014, about 40 countries signed the New York Declaration on Forests, a voluntary pledge to halve deforestation by 2020 and end it by 2030. The agreement was not legally binding, key countries including Brazil, China, and Russia did not sign, and deforestation increased from 2014 to 2020. In November 2021, 141 countries agreed at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow to the Glasgow Leaders' Declaration on Forests and Land Use, pledging to end and reverse deforestation by 2030. The agreement was accompanied by about 19.2 billion dollars in associated funding commitments. Some countries with high deforestation rates, including Malaysia, Cambodia, Laos, Paraguay, and Myanmar, did not sign the Glasgow Declaration. The European Union moved beyond voluntary pledges. In September 2022, the EU Parliament voted 453 to 57 to support a regulation requiring companies to prove that commodities like beef, wood, palm oil, soy, coffee and cocoa destined for EU consumers were not linked to deforestation after the 31st of December 2020. Brazil's Amazon soy moratorium, an agreement among commodities traders not to purchase from areas deforested after 2008, contributed to a reduction in deforestation rates, with less than 2% of production land non-compliant in 2018-19. Indigenous land rights offer another lever. In Brazil, forested areas given tenure to indigenous groups have even lower rates of clearing than national parks. In the Congolian rainforests, community concessions have produced significantly less deforestation as communities are incentivized to manage land sustainably. Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, known as REDD, has emerged as a financial mechanism providing compensation to developing countries for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by protecting forests. At the COP-15 conference in Copenhagen in December 2009, developed countries committed to new and additional resources for forestry investments approaching 30 billion dollars for the period 2010-2012. Conservation International's 2011 list of the top ten most endangered forests found that each had already lost 90% or more of its original habitat, among them Indo-Burma at only 5% remaining and the Atlantic Forest of Brazil's coast at just 8%.