Measuring the deforestation that did not happen – a global perspective

Why do forests keep disappearing despite conservation interventions? The answer requires an unobservable counterfactual: a world in which these interventions never occurred. For 28 countries that account for 87% of global deforestation, we simulate counterfactual deforestation driven solely by agricultural profits. Under this scenario, deforestation rates would have increased by more than twice the observed rate relative to 2001-2004, so deforestation reduced relative to the counterfactual. However, correlations between reductions in deforestation in some countries and additional deforestation in others suggest that 43% of the reductions we have identified (23.9 ± 0.744 million hectares) were offset by leakage. If all 28 countries had achieved reductions comparable to the six most successful, global deforestation would have been 15.8% lower than in 2001-2004. Eliminating profit-oriented deforestation would require annual conservation payments of US$59 billion (<1% of sample GDP). Our framework enables transparent evaluation of conservation progress based on a parsimonious land-change model and supports monitoring at continental and global scales.