What has driven deforestation in the 21st century?

Reporting by Our World in Data

Over the last two decades, the world has cut down forests at a rate of roughly one Costa Rica per year.1

The largest driver of deforestation has been the expansion of agriculture. This has been true for millennia, and it remains the case today.

A recent study, published in Nature Food by Chandrakant Singh and Martin Persson, answered this question.2

In the chart below, you can see how much deforestation has been caused by different agricultural commodities. This is shown as the annual average between 2001 and 2023.

Beef was, by far, the largest driver, accounting for 41% of the total. Cattle need a lot of land for grazing, which means that the growing global demand for beef has led to the expansion of pasture. Beef alone has led to the destruction of more than two UK-sized areas of forest this century.

The second-largest driver was oilseeds. This category is dominated by deforestation for soy and palm oil; a lot of forest was lost to these plantations, especially in the first decade (as we’ll see later, these rates have fallen over the past ten years).

The other large drivers — accounting for 12% each — were forest plantations and cereal production.

Understanding what has driven deforestation is important, but so is understanding where the forests were lost.

Let’s then take the chart above, but break each bar into the respective regions where it happened. Looking at the chart below, we see that these losses are extremely geographically concentrated for many products.

More than half of deforestation for beef production occurred in Brazil. In fact, one-quarter of all deforestation this century was driven by Brazilian beef production alone. Most other cattle pasture expansion happened in Brazil’s neighbors in Latin America. So, clearance for beef is not only the world’s largest driver of deforestation; it has also been centered on some of the most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet: the Amazon rainforest and the Cerrado savanna.

Most deforestation for oilseeds — the second-largest driver — has been for palm oil and soy. Almost all of the world’s demand for palm oil has been met by just two countries — Indonesia and Malaysia — and this shows in the deforestation data. 6% of global deforestation has been caused by Indonesian palm oil production.

Forest plantations have been a large driver in parts of Asia and North America, particularly in the United States and China.

Finally, you can see that across most other products, it’s Africa — shown in green — where the most forest has been lost. This is true for staple crops, such as cereals and roots and tubers, as well as for cash crops, such as fruits, nuts, coffee, and cocoa beans. You can also see this clearly when looking at the continent’s annual data.

As I’ve written previously, countries across sub-Saharan Africa achieve very low crop yields compared to the rest of the world. As a consequence, most of the growth in food production has come from using more land, rather than using land more productively. This has come at the cost of forests. Improvements in agricultural productivity are not just essential for food security and poverty reduction, but also for preserving natural habitats.