Bolivia now loses more tropical forest than Indonesia

Claim types Estimate

Estimate (satellite). Global Forest Watch tree-cover loss is GROSS loss, not net deforestation (fire, plantations harvest and regrow). Values are tree cover loss inside humid tropical primary forest (UMD primary forest mask, Turubanova et al. 2018) by country, hectares per year, from the Hansen/UMD/Google/USGS/NASA Global Forest Change v1.12 data (loss years 2001–2024), read from the Global Forest Watch data API (table gadm__tcl__iso_change, version v20250515) via the progrss vault (source gfw; GUIDELINES §4.11, 30 matching re-reads, no mismatch). Licence: Hansen/UMD Global Forest Change, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0); credit: Hansen/UMD/Google/USGS/NASA. The publisher warns that 'care must be taken when comparing change across any interval' because mapping methods changed, so the plate uses only loss years 2015–2024 and compares countries within the same data and method. Bolivia: 83,291 ha (2015), 245,877 (2016), 270,242 (2017), 154,537 (2018), 290,650 (2019), 276,103 (2020), 292,264 (2021), 384,708 (2022), 490,542 (2023), 1,480,901 (2024). Indonesia: 666,637; 928,658; 373,255; 339,888; 323,646; 270,057; 202,906; 230,003; 292,374; 258,812. Five-year averages and shares are progrss calculations: Bolivia 208,919 ha a year in 2015–19 (4.9% of the 4.29 million ha lost across all reporting tropical countries) and 584,904 in 2020–24 (13.0% of 4.50 million ha); Indonesia 526,417 (12.3%) and 250,830 (5.6%). Same-method control: all 93 tropical countries with primary forest loss in the data; Bolivia moved from 4th to 2nd by five-year average, Indonesia from 2nd to 4th, Brazil stayed 1st (1.70 then 1.80 million ha a year), DR Congo 3rd (450,000 then 524,000). 2024 was a record year for tropical primary forest loss (6.72 million ha across reporting countries) with a very large Bolivian total; without 2024 (2019–23 average) Bolivia still ranks above Indonesia (3rd vs 4th). Takeaway 3's last clause is for the 2020–24 average. Indonesia's 2015–19 average includes its 2015–16 fire peak; over 2017–19 its loss averaged 345,596 ha a year. The 2020 crossing is narrow (276,103 vs 270,057 ha).