In 2023, the deforested area in the Legal Amazon in Brazil amounted to approximately 802,300 hectares. Just a year earlier, the Amazon deforested area surpassed 1.2 million hectares. What is behind the growing Amazon deforestation in Brazil? Illegal logging, expansion of agricultural areas for soybean cultivation, and an increase in wildfire outbreaks are all among the leading causes of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. Politics, however, has also played an important role. For example, the authorized budget for Brazil’s Ministry of the Environment has been on a mostly downward trend since 2013, when it reached a decade-long peak of nearly seven billion Brazilian reals. How big is the Brazilian deforestation issue? In 2023, Brazil registered by far the largest area of primary forest loss in the world, amounting to more than one million hectares. This was roughly the same area as the remaining top nine countries combined. As the country with the second-largest forest area worldwide, these developments are cause for concern amidst the conversation on climate change mitigation. With the global tree cover loss annually increasing, and the emission of greenhouse gases from forest areas along with it, reaching net-zero emissions targets by 2050 grows ever more challenging.

From 1990 and up until 2010, South America was the region in the world with the highest rate of forest loss, with an estimated 5.2 million hectares of net forest lost per year in the first decade of this century. Since then, the destruction of South American forests has slowed down to an average of 2.6 million hectares per year, the second largest forest loss rate in the world after Africa. The figures suggest that, despite reforestation efforts, forest areas in South America continue to be endangered by massive deforestation and wildfires.

The deforested area of the Brazilian Amazon declined by over 21 percent in 2023, when compared to the previous year. This was the second drop recorded in the last six years. The deforested area in the Brazilian Amazon stood at approximately nine thousand square kilometers in 2022.

Approximately 420 million hectares of forest area were lost due to deforestation between 1990 and 2020. However, the deforestation rate has slowed over the last three decades, down from the total 15.8 million hectares per year in 1990-2000 to 10.2 million hectares per year in 2015-2020. The climatic domain that has shown the highest pace of deforestation is the tropical, which saw 9.3 million hectares per year lost in 2015-2020. On the other hand, the boreal domain has the lowest deforestation rate, with a figure of 0.06 million hectares per year in 2015-2020.

Bar graphs of land cover composition vs. accessibility for three time periods.

Deforestation led to an annual loss of 4.4 million hectares of forest in Africa between 2015 and 2020. The conversion of forest to other land uses affected mostly the eastern and southern areas of the continent, at a deforestation rate of 2.2 million hectares per year. In Western and Central Africa, around 1.9 million hectares of forest were lost per year in the same period. Despite a small reduction observed in the period 2015-2020, the continental deforestation rate has overall increased since 1990. From that year until 2020, Africa has seen the greatest loss in forest area more than any region of the world.

The Canadian Environmental Sustainability Indicators (CESI) program provides data and information to track Canada's performance on key environmental sustainability issues. The Forest management and disturbances indicator includes information on the management of Canadian forests, disturbances to Canadian forests, and planting and seeding of trees in Canada. Specific measures included in this indicator look at the annual timber harvest, number of forest fires, areas burned by forest fires, defoliation by insects, deforestation, and seeding and planting. Information is provided to Canadians in a number of formats including: charts and graphs, HTML and CSV data tables, and downloadable reports. See the supplementary documentation for the data sources and details on how the data were collected and how the indicator was calculated. Canadian Environmental Sustainability Indicators: https://www.canada.ca/environmental-indicators

Data comprise causal diagrams which show links between aspects that influence the well-being of rural inhabitants (e.g. good quality of food, good family relationships, education, etc) with ecosystem services (e.g. food from trees, wood sticks for construction, firewood, wood for charcoal production, etc.) and their causes (e.g. change in land use) in rural Mozambique. Information was gathered at 20 workshops held in Maputo, Xai Xai, Lichinga, Quelimane, and at village level in the districts of Mabalane, Marrupa and Gurue in 2014 and 2015. The objective of the workshops was to examine aspects that influence well-being and their causes in the miombo woodland area of rural Mozambique. One of the objectives of the project was to construct Bayesian belief networks (BBNs) to model future land use change scenarios in rural Mozambique using a participatory approach, to evaluate the consequences of deforestation in the well-being of the rural population. The data were collected as part of the Abrupt Changes in Ecosystem Services and Wellbeing in Mozambican Woodlands (ACES) project and were funded by the Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation (ESPA) programme, funded by NERC, the Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Department for International Development (DfID), the three are government organizations from UK. The project was led by the University of Edinburgh, with the collaboration of the Universidad Mondlane, the IIED, and other organizations. Full details about this dataset can be found at https://doi.org/10.5285/14622c4b-8bd4-4624-8ea6-35da7da211cd

India lost 123 thousand hectares (kha) of tree cover in 2022, representing a decrease of 7.5 percent from the previous year. The highest tree cover loss from 2022 to 2022 was observed in 2017, at 189 kma.

Forests cover over four billion hectares of the Earth's landmass, around 31 percent of the total land area. As of 2022, worldwide forest area measured some 4.05 billion hectares, down from approximately 4.24 billion hectares in 1990. From 1990 to 2022, no country saw a greater percentage change in forest area than Côte d'Ivoire, which lost more than half of its forests.

In 2021, more than 28.4 million people were estimated to reside within the Legal Amazon area in Brazil. Since 1970, the resident population in the region has quadrupled. The Legal Amazon in Brazil extends across nine Brazilian states, with the the largest area located in the state of Amazonas.