Your morning coffee may help fell trees on another continent
Where forests fall is not always where their products end up. A 2021 analysis estimated that consumption in G7 countries costs an average of 3.9 trees per person every year, often through imports like coffee. Agriculture now drives nearly 90 per cent of global deforestation, as farms and pasture replace woodland.
Deforestation means turning forest into something else: fields, ranches, towns or mines. Forests cover roughly 31 per cent of Earth's land, a third less than before farming spread, and half of that shrinkage happened in the last century. The world holds about 4.14 billion hectares of forest, and more than half sits in just five countries, led by Russia and Brazil. South America is the most heavily forested continent by share of land, at 49 per cent.
A key subtlety is the gap between deforestation and net change. Net change adds new growth back in, so a country can clear old forest while its total tree area rises. That distinction explains why estimates seem to clash. Gross deforestation has slowed, from about 17.6 million hectares a year in the 1990s to 10.9 million in 2015 to 2025, yet net loss actually rose in that latest decade to 4.12 million hectares yearly, because new forest growth slowed too. Asia and Europe gained forest after 1990, while Africa and South America lost substantial areas.
Tropical forests bear the brunt, and they shelter the majority of the planet's land animals and plants. Of the roughly 16 million square kilometres of rainforest that once existed, only about 6.2 million remain. In 2019 the world lost 3.8 million hectares of humid tropical primary forest, equivalent to a football pitch every six seconds. The IPCC reported in 2022 that more than 90 per cent of forest lost between 1990 and 2020 was tropical.
The damage compounds. Clearing destroys habitat, drives extinctions, displaces Indigenous forest peoples and leaves land open to erosion and desertification. It also weakens forests' ability to absorb carbon dioxide, which matters for farming itself as climate change threatens food systems. Wildfires feed the cycle: huge Canadian fires in 2023, worsened by climate change, pushed global tree cover loss up 24 per cent even as tropical primary forest loss fell 9 per cent.
Source: Deforestation
