Africa’s Forests at a Turning Point

By Daniel Otunge

Africa’s forests are becoming central to the global fight against deforestation, but current action falls far short of the 2030 target, the 2026 Forest Declaration Assessment finds.

The world promised to end deforestation by 2030, yet progress remains dangerously slow. The new assessment finds that the world cleared 7 million hectares of forest in 2025. Although this was 15% lower than in 2024, it was still far above the level needed to keep the 2030 commitment within reach.

For Africa, the warning is especially urgent. In 2025, the Congo Basin lost 2.4 million hectares of forest, almost the same as tropical Latin America’s 2.5 million hectares. This is the first time that tropical Africa’s annual forest loss has approached that of Latin America, historically the world’s largest deforestation hotspot.

The Congo Basin is the world’s second-largest tropical forest after the Amazon. It spans several African countries and supports millions of people through food, water, energy, livelihoods, and cultural connections to the land. It also stores vast amounts of carbon and helps regulate rainfall across Central Africa and beyond. Its continued destruction would have serious consequences not only for the continent, but for the global climate.

The Global Promise Is Slipping Away

At the 2021 Glasgow climate summit, 145 countries pledged to halt and reverse forest loss by 2030. To achieve that goal, global deforestation needed to fall by about 1 million hectares each year from the 2018–2020 baseline of 8.3 million hectares.

That decline has not happened. By 2024, deforestation should have fallen to no more than 5 million hectares, but it was still about 8 million hectares. By 2025, it should have reached 4.2 million hectares; instead, it stood at 7 million hectares.

The cumulative gap is now estimated at 10.7 million hectares of forest that would still be standing if the world had stayed on course. That is an area roughly the size of Iceland.

A single year of lower forest loss is encouraging, but it cannot make up for years of weak action. The central problem is that the economic and political systems driving deforestation have not changed enough. Across many regions, people still treat forests as reserves of land for agriculture, mining, timber extraction, and infrastructure. In contrast, the people who protect forests often lack secure land rights, adequate support, or a meaningful share in forest-based revenues.

Why the Congo Basin faces growing pressure

Agricultural expansion, logging, and mining largely drive forest loss in tropical Africa. Small-scale farming is an important part of rural livelihoods. Still, forest conversion is also linked to weak land-use planning, informal timber extraction, poorly regulated investment, and limited enforcement capacity.

In 2025, forest degradation in tropical Africa rose by 25% to 1.1 million hectares, even as degradation declined globally. Forest degradation occurs when logging, fire, or repeated small-scale clearing damages forests without completely removing them. It weakens ecosystems, reduces carbon storage, and makes forests more vulnerable to future clearing and fires.

Small-scale agricultural expansion, informal logging, and weak enforcement drove the increase in Africa. These are closely connected to broader development challenges: limited rural infrastructure, lack of affordable energy alternatives, insecure land tenure, constrained public budgets and insufficient investment in sustainable livelihoods.

The report also highlights the pressure that debt can place on African countries. When governments face severe fiscal constraints, extractive industries can offer quick income through timber, minerals, oil, or agricultural exports. But this approach can create long-term costs by damaging water systems, reducing agricultural resilience, increasing climate risks, and undermining local livelihoods.

Forest protection is a development issue.

We should not present forest protection as a choice between conservation and development. Healthy forests are productive economic assets. They regulate water flows, support rainfall patterns, provide food and medicines, protect soils and help communities cope with droughts and floods.

When forests are cleared, the costs spread far beyond the forest frontier. Farmers can face declining yields as rainfall becomes less predictable and soils deteriorate. Cities and industries may face greater competition for water. Communities can lose income from forest products, while governments may bear rising costs for disaster response, food insecurity, and damaged infrastructure.

Forest loss can also increase health risks by disrupting ecosystems and increasing contact between people, livestock and wildlife. These effects are often overlooked when decisions are judged only by the immediate profits from timber, mining or land conversion.

For African countries, the opportunity is to build development models that create jobs and income while keeping natural systems intact. This includes improving yields on existing farmland rather than expanding cultivation into forests; supporting agroforestry; strengthening community forestry; investing in legal, sustainable timber value chains; and ensuring that mining and infrastructure projects meet strong environmental standards.

Lessons from other regions

Latin America shows that policy choices can reduce forest loss. Over the past five years, stronger enforcement and renewed forest-protection measures in countries such as Brazil contributed to a 33% reduction in deforestation across tropical Latin America. Brazil’s revived Amazon deforestation action plan and stepped-up enforcement helped drive much of the global improvement seen in 2025.

However, that progress remains vulnerable to political change. Elections, shifts in public priorities, and pressure from extractive industries can quickly weaken protections. The lesson is not that forest protection depends on a particular government, but that voluntary commitments and short-term enforcement campaigns are not enough on their own.

Durable progress requires laws that survive political cycles, institutions with the resources to enforce them, transparent land-use decisions and secure rights for Indigenous Peoples and local communities.

This is highly relevant in Africa. Many communities have protected and managed forests for generations, yet their land rights are often insecure or poorly recognized. Giving communities enforceable tenure rights, legal authority, and a fair share of benefits can improve conservation while supporting local economies.

Strong laws matter more than voluntary promises

The assessment concludes that strong policy and reliable enforcement are the most durable ways to stop deforestation. Voluntary corporate commitments can help, but they can unravel when market conditions or politics change.

Brazil’s Amazon Soy Moratorium illustrates this risk. The voluntary agreement, under which major traders avoided soy grown on recently deforested land, was effective for two decades. But it began to weaken after one state removed tax incentives from companies that continued to comply.

African governments and regional institutions can draw a clear lesson: forest protection needs legal foundations. These should include enforceable land-use plans, transparent licensing, stronger action against illegal logging, safeguards for mining and agricultural concessions, and rules that prevent public subsidies from encouraging forest destruction.

African governments and regional institutions can draw a clear lesson: forest protection needs legal foundations. These should include enforceable land-use plans, transparent licensing, stronger action against illegal logging, safeguards for mining and agricultural concessions, and rules that prevent public subsidies from encouraging forest destruction.

International markets also have a role. The European Union Deforestation Regulation already encourages companies and trading partners to improve traceability in supply chains linked to commodities such as cocoa, coffee, timber, rubber, cattle, and palm oil. For African producers, this creates challenges, especially for smallholders who may struggle with compliance costs. But it can also create an opportunity to strengthen traceability, improve market access and reward deforestation-free production.

Support must include small farmers and community producers rather than exclude them from export markets. This means investing in mapping, documentation, cooperative systems, digital traceability, and extension services, rather than placing the burden solely on producers.

Finance Must Reach Forest Communities

Forest countries cannot be expected to carry the costs of global climate protection alone. The Congo Basin’s forests benefit the entire world, yet financing for their protection has often been limited, unpredictable, or difficult for local communities to access.

The proposed Tropical Forest Forever Facility offers one possible route toward longer-term payments for standing forests, including direct access for Indigenous Peoples and local communities. Such finance will matter only if it is reliable, transparent, and shared fairly with the people who live in and depend on forest landscapes.

Forest finance should support practical priorities: community land rights, local monitoring, restoration of degraded areas, sustainable agriculture, clean energy alternatives, fire prevention, ranger and enforcement capacity, and locally owned enterprises that generate income without clearing forests.

A Defining Choice for Africa and the World

The Congo Basin is approaching a critical moment. Forest loss and degradation are rising, while climate change is increasing the risk of droughts, fires, and ecosystem damage. A possible super El Niño event could intensify fire-related forest degradation across tropical regions, adding further pressure.

Yet the future is not fixed. Africa can avoid being locked into a development model based on extraction and forest conversion. The most effective path combines stronger governance, secure community rights, better agricultural productivity, responsible investment, long-term international finance, and firm enforcement against illegal destruction.

Keeping forests standing is not an obstacle to prosperity. It is essential to protecting water, food systems, jobs, public health, and climate resilience for African communities today and future generations.

The writer is an expert in environmental law and development communication.

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