The global deforestation footprint of agriculture and forestry

Abstract

Global forest loss impacts climate, biodiversity and sustainable development goals. Deforestation footprinting attributes forest loss to commodity production and consumption, identifying global trends, drivers and hot spots to inform zero-deforestation policies. In this Review, we provide an overview of global deforestation footprinting approaches and their trends. Major economies, including Brazil, Indonesia, China, the United States and Europe, are responsible for most commodity-linked deforestation, with agriculture-linked deforestation in Brazil alone reaching over 12.8 million hectares between 2005 and 2015. Agriculture is a dominant driver of deforestation. For example, 86% of global deforestation occurring between 2001 and 2022 can be attributed to crop and cattle production. Footprinting of commodity-linked deforestation has contributed to the scope and implementation of supply chain regulation to mitigate forest loss. For example, footprint estimates have been used in risk assessments for EU and UK due diligence regulations. Although forest loss to agriculture is relatively well documented, a lack of data on non-agricultural drivers — such as mining and mangrove clearance for aquaculture — limits the scope of footprints in fully attributing total global forest loss to human activities. Future research should focus on methodological and data harmonization, transparency and sharing to enable footprinting approaches to cover a wider range of deforestation drivers. Deforestation footprints identify trade- and consumption-linked hot spots of forest loss. This Review synthesizes existing footprint assessments, finding that Brazil, Indonesia and China are major drivers of commodity-linked deforestation, but that estimates are influenced by method choice.