The world lost a record amount of forest in 2024, driven by a catastrophic rise in fires.
New data from the University of Maryland’s GLAD Lab, made available on World Resources Institute’s (WRI) Global Forest Watch platform, shows that loss of tropical primary forests alone reached 6.7 million hectares last year - twice as much as in 2023 and an area nearly the size of Panama. That is around 18 football pitches lost every 18 minutes.
