Deforestation is concentrated in tropical regions, with South America, Central Africa, and Southeast Asia accounting for the vast majority of global forest loss. But significant tree cover disappears in boreal forests across Russia and Canada too, driven by wildfires and logging rather than agriculture. The pattern is shifting over time, with some historically hard-hit regions slowing their losses while others accelerate.
The Amazon and Surrounding Lowlands
Brazil remains the single largest source of deforestation on Earth, losing an average of 1.5 million hectares of forest per year between 2010 and 2020. Most of that loss occurs in the Amazon basin, where cattle ranching is the dominant driver. The expansion of pasture land for beef production alone accounts for 41% of all tropical deforestation worldwide, and a huge share of that grazing land is carved from Brazilian forest.
But the Amazon isn’t the only South American forest under pressure. The Gran Chaco, a massive tropical dry forest stretching across Argentina, Paraguay, and Bolivia, is being cleared at striking rates for both cattle ranching and soybean production. The Dry Chaco spans 87 million hectares, larger than Texas and New York combined. Between 2000 and 2019, its forest cover shrank by more than 20%, with Paraguay experiencing the steepest losses. Research using satellite imagery found that 27% of the Paraguayan Chaco disappeared between 1987 and 2012. These dry forests attract less attention than the Amazon but are vanishing quickly.
The Congo Basin
Central Africa’s Congo Basin is the world’s second-largest tropical forest, and its deforestation follows a pattern very different from South America’s. Rather than large-scale commercial agriculture, small-scale farming drives the overwhelming majority of forest loss here. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo alone, smallholder clearing accounts for nearly two-thirds of all forest loss across the entire basin. In both the DRC and the Central African Republic, more than 90% of forest loss comes from small-scale rotational agriculture, where families clear patches of forest, farm them for a few seasons, then move on.
Gabon is the exception. There, industrial selective logging causes more forest loss than small-scale agriculture, and the Republic of the Congo and Cameroon also see significant logging-driven clearing. Across the region, selective logging contributes roughly 10% of total forest disturbance, but in Gabon specifically it accounts for over 30% and in the Republic of the Congo nearly 40%. The drivers in Central Africa are deeply tied to poverty and subsistence needs, making solutions fundamentally different from those aimed at corporate supply chains in South America or Southeast Asia.
Southeast Asia
Indonesia has been one of the world’s deforestation hotspots for decades, with palm oil plantations often cited as the primary cause. That was true in the late 2000s, when large-scale plantations drove more than half of Indonesia’s primary forest loss. The peak came between 2008 and 2010, when an average of 600,000 hectares of forest disappeared annually, with 57% of that driven by expanding industrial farms.
The picture has since changed in a surprising way. By 2014 to 2016, annual primary forest loss had actually increased to over 800,000 hectares, but large-scale plantations accounted for only 25% of it. The rest came from a mix of smaller-scale clearing, mining, timber plantations, and other causes. This shift matters because it means targeting big palm oil companies alone won’t solve Indonesia’s deforestation problem. The drivers have become more diffuse and harder to regulate.
Russia and Canada’s Boreal Forests
Tropical forests dominate the deforestation conversation, but the boreal forests stretching across Russia and Canada lose enormous areas of tree cover every year. Between 2011 and 2013, these two countries combined lost an average of nearly 6.8 million hectares annually, an area roughly the size of Ireland. Russia alone lost about 4.3 million hectares per year, nearly double Canada’s 2.5 million hectares.
The critical difference is the cause. Fires account for around 70% of tree cover loss in both countries. Some of these fires are natural, others are human-caused, and climate change is making fire seasons longer and more intense. This type of loss is categorically different from tropical deforestation: boreal forests can regenerate after fire over decades, while cleared tropical forest converted to farmland or pasture rarely returns. Still, the scale is massive, and as warming accelerates, boreal fire losses are expected to grow.
What’s Driving the Clearing
At least three-quarters of global deforestation is driven by agriculture. Beef, soy, and palm oil together are responsible for 60% of tropical deforestation. Cattle pasture alone accounts for 41%. Oilseed crops, primarily palm oil and soy but also sunflower, rapeseed, and sesame, drive another 18%. The remaining share comes from forestry, mining, infrastructure, and urbanization.
These commodities connect deforestation to global consumer markets. Beef raised on former Amazon forest ends up in supply chains worldwide. Palm oil from former Indonesian rainforest appears in processed foods, cosmetics, and biofuel. Soy grown on cleared Chaco forest feeds livestock on other continents. The geography of deforestation is tropical, but the economic forces pulling the trigger are global.
Where Forests Are Growing Back
Not every region is losing forest. Europe and Asia have both seen net increases in forest area since the 1990s, largely through deliberate reforestation programs. China leads the world in forest gain, adding an average of 1.9 million hectares per year between 2010 and 2020, more than offsetting Brazil’s 1.5 million hectares of annual loss in raw numbers. India, Chile, Vietnam, and Australia have also added forest cover in recent years.
These gains come with important caveats. Much of the new forest in China and India consists of monoculture plantations, which store carbon but support far less biodiversity than the primary tropical forests being lost in Brazil or the DRC. A hectare of eucalyptus plantation in southern China is not ecologically equivalent to a hectare of old-growth Amazon rainforest. Globally, forest area has continued to shrink by about 0.1% per year over the past decade, meaning gains in some regions are not fully compensating for losses elsewhere. South America saw the steepest regional decline, losing forest at a rate of 0.3% per year from 2010 to 2020, an improvement from the 0.6% annual loss rate of the previous decade but still a significant net reduction.