On Friday, I published my annual “Year in Rainforests” on Mongabay. The process is always taxing and every year I swear will be the last. Here’s a summary of the piece.
2025 was a mixed year for the world’s tropical rainforests. In several countries, deforestation declined, sometimes sharply. At the same time, other forms of loss became more visible, including fire, degradation, and the steady expansion of infrastructure and extraction into forest landscapes. Governments renewed commitments to forest protection, yet many of the pressures shaping forests in 2025 came from decisions made years earlier, now playing out under hotter and drier conditions.
In the Amazon, the most closely watched rainforest region, Brazil again reported a decline in clear-cut deforestation. Official figures showed an 11% drop in the 12 months through July, bringing annual loss to its lowest level in more than a decade. Independent monitoring broadly confirmed the trend. Federal enforcement, embargoes on illegally cleared land, and renewed use of satellite data under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva continued to constrain large-scale clearing, particularly for cattle ranching.
That success, however, did not define the year. Much of the Amazon entered 2025 already damaged by the severe drought and fires of 2024. Fires had accounted for the majority of primary forest loss the year before, and emissions from degradation and burning exceeded those from deforestation for the first time on record. Weather conditions were less extreme in 2025, and burned area fell sharply. Yet large areas of forest remained fragmented and slow to recover, leaving them vulnerable to renewed burning during dry spells. Loss increasingly occurred through selective logging, edge effects, and repeated disturbance that standard deforestation metrics do not capture well.
Policy decisions added complexity. Brazil placed the Amazon at the center of climate diplomacy by hosting COP30 in Belém and advancing the proposed Tropical Forest Forever Facility, a financing mechanism intended to reward countries for maintaining forest cover. At home, familiar tensions resurfaced. Courts temporarily suspended and then reinstated the soy moratorium. Momentum returned to long-delayed infrastructure projects, including paving sections of the BR-319 highway linking Manaus to southern Brazil. The government also approved plans to drill for oil near the mouth of the Amazon River, reopening debates over development priorities in sensitive ecosystems.
Elsewhere in the Amazon basin, trajectories diverged. Colombia strengthened Indigenous authority over environmental governance and pledged to halt new oil and large-scale mining in its Amazon region, even as deforestation rose in areas influenced by armed groups and organized crime. Peru moved in the opposite direction, with Congress advancing measures that weaken protections for Indigenous peoples in isolation and reopen protected areas to extraction. Across the basin, illegal gold mining and land grabbing adapted faster than enforcement, remaining persistent sources of forest loss and violence.
In the Congo Basin, pressures intensified rather than eased. Satellite data confirmed record primary forest loss in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2024, with effects extending into 2025. Clearing spread into provinces previously considered relatively intact, driven by small-scale agriculture, charcoal production, and mining. Fire activity increased in western regions, including areas overlying the Cuvette Centrale peatlands, raising concern about carbon losses that remain poorly quantified.
Conflict amplified these trends in the east. The resurgence of the M23 armed group weakened enforcement and disrupted fuel supply chains. In Kahuzi-Biega and Virunga national parks, clearing expanded around charcoal routes serving growing cities. Research published in 2025 showed that the indirect impacts of artisanal mining—settlements, farms, and fuelwood demand—now exceed the forest loss caused directly by mining pits themselves.
Indonesia again stood apart in headline figures. Official data showed forest loss roughly 11% lower than in 2023, extending a multiyear decline. Despite drought across parts of Southeast Asia, the country avoided the catastrophic fire seasons once associated with El Niño. Analysts credited improved early-warning systems, faster suppression, and coordination between companies and villages, particularly in peatland regions.
Still, vulnerabilities were evident. Hundreds of thousands of hectares burned, much of it on drained peat within industrial concessions, sending smoke across Sumatra and Kalimantan. Later in the year, Cyclone Senyar triggered devastating floods and landslides in parts of Sumatra. Scientists cautioned against attributing the storm itself to climate change, but Indonesian officials acknowledged that deforestation and peatland drainage had worsened its impacts. Investigations also documented continued violations inside licensed concessions, including clearing of natural forest and canal construction on protected peat. Whether these findings lead to license revocations or prosecutions remains unresolved.
At the global level, climate diplomacy produced limited outcomes for forests. COP30 avoided collapse and advanced technical work on adaptation and finance, but delivered no binding pathway to halt deforestation. The Tropical Forest Forever Facility attracted initial pledges but fell well short of capitalization targets, leaving its future uncertain.
Market signals were uneven. Gold prices reached record highs, boosting wildcat mining from the Amazon and to Madagascar, and beyond. Cocoa prices remained historically high, encouraging expansion in parts of West and Central Africa. Beef exports from Brazil continued to grow, supported by stable prices and shifting trade flows. Palm oil prices rose modestly, easing pressure in some regions while encouraging expansion in others.
Forest carbon markets contracted under scrutiny. Trading slowed as buyers became more selective and regulators intervened in cases linked to illegal activity. Attention shifted toward jurisdictional programs and public finance mechanisms, though none yet operate at the scale required to offset broader pressures.
By the end of 2025, tropical forests had not entered a new phase of recovery. In some places, deforestation slowed. In others, loss accelerated or changed form. The year offered fewer sweeping shifts than a series of consequential, uneven developments that will shape forest outcomes well beyond a single reporting cycle.
