Tropical forest loss doubled in 2024 as wildfires rocketed

The amount of tropical forest lost in 2024 was double that in 2023 and the highest in at least two decades as climate change made rainforests susceptible to uncontrollable fires.

A record 67,000 square kilometres of primary rainforest was lost from the tropics in 2024, according to an annual assessment of satellite imagery by Global Forest Watch and the University of Maryland. Primary forest refers to mature forest that has never been disturbed by logging.

The report’s authors attributed the surge in forest loss to the El Niño weather phenomenon and the warming global climate, which made the rainforest a tinderbox.

“We are in a new phase where it’s not just clearing for agriculture that’s the main driver [of forest loss],” says Rod Taylor at Global Forest Watch, an initiative of the World Resources Institute. “Now we have this new amplifying effect, which is the real climate change feedback loop, where fires are much more intense and ferocious than they have ever been.”

Tropical forests regulate weather systems and store carbon, cooling the planet, but in recent years deforestation has brought them to a tipping point at which they sometimes emit more carbon than they absorb, creating a feedback loop.

Five times more primary forest was lost from fires in the tropics in 2024 than in 2023, accounting for 48 per cent of all primary rainforest loss, the report found.

Globally, fires caused greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 4.1 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide last year, more than four times the amount from air travel in 2023.

El Niño events are associated with warmer and drier weather in tropical regions. Although El Niño officially subsided in April 2024, its effects continued to be felt as rainforest soils and vegetation remained dried out from scorching temperatures and previous wildfires.

The world’s warming climate also played a role, with 2024 the hottest year on record and Brazil’s driest in seven decades, says Ane Alencar at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute in Belém, Brazil.

Brazil lost 28,000 km² of primary forest – its highest figure since 2016 – accounting for 42 per cent of all tropical primary forest loss.

In the Brazilian Amazon, fires accounted for 60 per cent of forest loss, as people exploited dry conditions to clear land for agriculture.

There were also massive wildfires outside the tropics in countries such as Canada and Russia. Globally, the area of forest lost was 300,000 km², another new record.

“Some scientists say we’re not in the Anthropocene but the Pyrocene – the age of fire – and I think this report shows that,” says Erika Berenguer at the University of Oxford.

While forest fires are concerning, Berenguer cautions that the figures may include degradation, where some of the tree canopy is lost, and this should not be conflated with deforestation, where forest is cleared entirely.

“Degradation reduces carbon storage [and] biodiversity and increases vulnerability to future fires, but it’s not the same as transforming land into a soy field or pasture,” she says.

The report shows how successive years of degradation and the warming climate have made the rainforest fragile, says Alencar.

“Usually with fires in the Amazon, you see degradation, but the forest can recover,” she says. “However, this report shows that when you have a very strong drought it creates the perfect conditions for the forest to burn intensely and you reach a point where the forest is lost entirely.”