The world is falling significantly behind its pledge to end deforestation by 2030, with a cumulative shortfall of 10.7 million hectares of forest, an area roughly the size of Iceland, a new global assessment has found.

The 2026 Forest Declaration Assessment, released ahead of a major climate summit yesterday, said that although global deforestation declined by 15 per cent in 2025, the improvement was insufficient to reverse years of slow progress towards the target.

The report found that approximately seven million hectares of forest were lost to deforestation last year, compared with about 8.2 million hectares in 2024.

However, annual forest loss remained far above the levels required to achieve zero deforestation by the end of the decade.

The assessment, compiled by a coalition of more than two dozen civil society and research organisations, tracks progress towards commitments made by countries, businesses and investors to halt deforestation and restore 30 per cent of degraded forest ecosystems by 2030.

It measures annual forest loss against a 2018–2020 baseline, when deforestation averaged 8.3 million hectares a year, and assesses whether reductions are sufficient to bring the figure to zero by 2030.

According to the report, deforestation needed to decline by roughly one million hectares annually to keep the world on track. By 2024, forest loss should have fallen to no more than five million hectares, but it remained at about eight million hectares. The target for 2025 was 4.2 million hectares, against the actual figure of seven million hectares.

The report’s principal author and lead consultant at Climate Focus, Erin Matson, said the decline recorded in 2025 was welcome but should not be mistaken for a sustained turnaround.

Matson said the 10.7-million-hectare deficit represented the difference between the forest that would have been preserved if the world had remained on track towards the 2030 goal and the destruction that had occurred during the decade.

A report co-author and senior consultant at Climate Focus, Ivan Palmegiani, likened the growing shortfall to unpaid credit-card debt, warning that each additional hectare lost increased the burden of meeting the global commitment.

He attributed the persistent losses to harmful economic incentives, weak governance and inadequate protection for Indigenous Peoples and local communities.

The report also highlighted growing concern over deforestation in Africa, finding that forest loss in the Congo Basin approached the level recorded in the Amazon region for the first time.

The Congo Basin lost 2.4 million hectares of forest in 2025, compared with 2.5 million hectares across Latin America. The basin contains one of the world’s largest remaining expanses of relatively intact tropical rainforest and is second in size only to the Amazon.

The assessment said the figures reflected diverging trends across the world’s major tropical forest regions.

In Latin America, forest loss has declined following policy interventions in some countries, including Brazil’s renewed Amazon deforestation action plan and stronger enforcement measures. These efforts contributed to a 33 per cent reduction in deforestation across the region over the five-year period examined by the report and were a major factor behind the global decline recorded in 2025.

In contrast, the report found no comparable policy response in the Congo Basin, where forest loss has been driven largely by agricultural expansion, timber extraction and mining.

Forest governance expert Alison Hoare, who contributed to the assessment, said countries in tropical Africa lacked the investment and institutional support needed to tackle the major causes of deforestation.

She said weak land-use management and enforcement had been compounded by insufficient international support, including the failure to provide African countries with debt relief.

Hoare warned that without urgent action, countries risked becoming increasingly dependent on extractive industries, potentially worsening forest destruction across the region.

Despite the progress recorded in Latin America, the assessment warned that the gains could be reversed by political changes and shifts in government policy.

It noted that forest protection in the region depended heavily on decisions by a relatively small number of governments, making continued progress vulnerable to changes in political leadership.