Tropical rainforest loss eases after record year, but still ‘11 football fields a minute’

The pace of tropical forest destruction slowed in 2025 after record losses the year before but remained at worrying levels equivalent to 11 football fields per minute, researchers said Wednesday.The world lost 4.3 million hectares (10.6 million acres) of tropical primary rainforest last year, down 36 per cent from 2024, said researchers from the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the University of Maryland.“A drop of this scale in a single year is encouraging – it shows what decisive government action can achieve,” said Elizabeth Goldman, co-director of WRI’s Global Forest Watch platform.“But part of the decline reflects a lull after an extreme fire year,” Goldman said.The researchers also warned that fires fuelled by climate change have become a “dangerous new normal” which threatens to reverse the recent gains made by government efforts to tackle deforestation.A river flowing through the Amazon rainforest in 2023. Photo: Jens Büttner/dpaThe warming El Niño weather phenomenon is expected to return in the middle of the year, which could push global temperatures even higher, raising the threat of heatwaves, droughts and wildfires.