How we track the world’s forests

What the dashboard shows, where the numbers come from, how current they are, and what they can’t tell you.

The short answer

Satellites see every year where trees disappear. But losing tree cover is not always deforestation: a burned forest, a logged plantation or a field cleared for a few years of farming usually grows back. Deforestation is forest turned for good into something else, mostly farmland. This dashboard separates the two for every country since 2001, and sets the satellite record against FAO’s figures and the 2030 pledge to halt forest loss.

How we know

Tree cover loss. The University of Maryland’s Global Land Analysis and Discovery lab maps, every year, where trees taller than 5 metres were removed, from Landsat satellite images at 30-metre resolution (Hansen et al. 2013). Global Forest Watch, run by the World Resources Institute, publishes the results.

Causes. In 2025 Global Forest Watch published a new map of the main cause of loss in each square kilometre: permanent agriculture, mining and energy, settlements and roads, shifting cultivation, logging, wildfire, and other natural causes such as storms. We count the first three as forest cleared for good. Our World in Data publishes the result per country and year as a public file, which we download.

FAO. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s Global Forest Resources Assessment is built from countries’ own reports. Its 2025 edition found deforestation of 10.9 million hectares a year in 2015–2025, down from 17.6 million in 1990–2000. Satellite and national figures differ because they define forest and loss differently.

The 2030 goal. The Forest Declaration Assessment, by an independent group of research and civil society organisations, tracks the pledge, made in Glasgow in 2021, to halt forest loss by 2030. For 2024 it counted 8.1 million hectares of forest lost, 63% above the path to zero.

How current each part is

• Tree cover loss by cause: yearly; the latest year is 2024, and the next update is expected in late 2026.
• FAO and the Forest Declaration Assessment: as published, checked 26 October 2026.

What the dashboard can’t tell you

It is not a real-time alert system. For weekly alerts of new clearing, see Global Forest Watch.

Tree cover includes plantations, so harvesting a plantation counts as loss, and new trees are not added back. The cause map gives one main cause per square kilometre, which can hide mixed causes. Loss to fire can become permanent if the forest does not recover, which is more likely as droughts get worse.

Further reading

• Hansen et al. (2013), Science: high-resolution global maps of 21st-century forest cover change. doi.org/10.1126/science.1244693
• Pendrill et al. (2022), Science: agriculture drove 90–99% of tropical deforestation in 2011–2015. doi.org/10.1126/science.abm9267
• FAO (2025): Global Forest Resources Assessment 2025. fao.org/forest-resources-assessment
• Forest Declaration Assessment 2025. forestdeclaration.org
• Global Forest Watch: maps, country data and weekly alerts. globalforestwatch.org

Credits

Tree cover loss from the University of Maryland’s GLAD lab, causes from Global Forest Watch / World Resources Institute, both published under open licences and republished by Our World in Data; FAO and the Forest Declaration Assessment as cited. We only download and present their public data.