Natural forest regrowth in the world’s tropical rainforests is expanding. According to the Forest Declaration Assessment 2025, more than 11 million hectares (27 million acres) of tropical moist forests are under some stage of forest regrowth between 2015 and 2021.
The growth is most notable in the tropical areas of Latin America, where regrowth increased by nearly 750%. In the tropical region of Asia, it was 450%. However, data were missing for most regions.
“We’d rather see that regrowth than not, of course. But increased regrowth is not a straightforward piece of good news,” Erin Matson, the assessment’s lead author, told Mongabay by email. “Tropical forests wouldn’t be regrowing if they weren’t cleared in the first place. An increase in regrowth is often correlated to an increase in loss.”
The increase of regrowth may simply mirror a spike in deforestation and degradation. Fires have wiped out large areas of tropical forests, which have become more prone to wildfires and drought due to human-caused climate change.
The recent report showed that despite a 2021 pledge by 127 countries to reach zero deforestation by 2030, deforestation has not yet slowed, remaining at an average of more than 8 million hectares (20 million acres) a year.
Since 1990, an estimated 51 million hectares (126 million acres) of tropical moist forest are regenerating, the assessment notes. More than half, however, are in areas that are under high deforestation pressure. Between 2015 and 2023, roughly 260,000 hectares (642,500 acres) of secondary growth in tropical moist forests were again cleared or degraded.
“Tracking forest regrowth is more challenging than detecting forest losses because regrowth is a gradual process and rates can vary greatly based on biomes, environmental conditions, and the scale and severity of disturbance,” the report’s authors write.
During the 2023-2024 El Niño, when the Amazon Rainforest was at its driest, nearly 150,000 forest fires were recorded per month in the dry season.
“This has been almost seven times more than any previous El Niño years,” Sassan Saatchi, senior scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and founder of CTrees, a nonprofit platform that tracks the carbon stored in the world’s forests, said during a video press conference. “Especially in Brazil … even though they’re reducing deforestation, their forest loss is still really high.”
Yet natural regrowth offers a promising low-cost path to widespread restoration in tropical rainforests. If protected from new clearings and left to their own devices, these forests can help ecosystems recover, sequester and store carbon as the trees grow and slowly restore lost biodiversity.
“Amid the 2024 losses of forest cover and forest integrity, restoration efforts reveal both untapped potential and emerging success,” the authors’ write. “Protecting these young secondary forests is as critical as preserving primary and pristine forests.”
Banner image: Forest recovery in the Brazilian Amazon. Image courtesy of Celso Silva Junior.
This story first appeared on Mongabay
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