New Delhi, May 22 -- Driven largely by massive fires, the tropics lost 6.7 million hectares of primary rainforest in 2024. This record-breaking tropical forest loss seen in 2024 is more than any other year in at least the last two decades.

The new data from the University of Maryland's GLAD lab and available on World Resources Institute (WRI) Global Forest Watch platform revealed that tropical primary forest disappeared at a rate of 18 football fields per minute in 2024. This was nearly double that of 2023. The loss of these forests in 2024 is estimated to have caused 3.1 gigatonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.

Latin America was the hardest hit, so much so that the reduction in primary forest loss seen in Brazil and Colombia in 2023 wa...