Zambia's yearly tree loss rose by nearly half

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 (canopy above 30%) 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. Zambia: 87,182 ha (2015), 141,401 (2016), 162,432 (2017), 143,920 (2018), 124,580 (2019), 162,802 (2020), 201,228 (2021), 179,007 (2022), 190,290 (2023), 229,625 (2024). Loss attributed to fire was small in Zambia (2,885 ha a year in 2015–19, 1,224 in 2020–24). Five-year averages and changes are progrss calculations: Zambia 131,903 ha a year in 2015–19 and 192,590 in 2020–24 (+60,687 ha, +46%). Same-method control: all 46 sub-Saharan African countries in the data lost 3.98 million ha a year in 2015–19 and 3.87 million in 2020–24 (−3%). Madagascar's fall (−109,977) was the largest in the region. Next-largest rises: Cameroon +55,454 ha (125,097 to 180,551), Angola +55,071 (217,884 to 272,955), Tanzania +38,514 (154,831 to 193,345), Mozambique +22,053, DR Congo +21,818. Largest falls: Madagascar −109,977, Sierra Leone −77,786, Côte d'Ivoire −67,610, Guinea −41,816, Liberia −22,152. The chart shows the 12 African countries with the most loss in 2020–24 after DR Congo, which is left off the scale (1.27 million ha a year in 2015–19, 1.30 million in 2020–24). Zambia's 2024 total is the highest in its 2015–24 data.