| 22 Oct 2025
New FAOSTAT forest emissions and removals estimates: 1990–2025
Abstract. FAOSTAT forest emissions and removals statistics were updated for the period 1990–2025 for 234 countries and territories, using new country data collected via the Forest Resources Assessment (FRA) 2025. The new FAOSTAT estimates align with the published literature, indicating that the world forests were net carbon sinks, storing an additional 140 Gt CO2 in their standing living biomass over the 1990–2025 period, while losing 100 Mha and 17 Gt C through net forest conversion—a proxy used in FAOSTAT for deforestation. For the most recent period available in this release, 2021–2025, the FRA 2025 FAOSTAT estimates of mean annual forest removals were -3.6 Gt CO2 yr-1, only partially offset by net forest conversion losses averaging 2.8 Gt CO2 yr-1, resulting in mean annual net removals of −0.8 Gt CO2 yr-1 during 2021–2025. This net flux had decreased nearly 80 % from mean annual values of −1.4 Gt CO2 yr-1 a decade earlier, during 2011–2015. Forest emissions/removals data independently reported by countries to the United Nations Framework on Climate Change were found to be in good agreement with the FAOSTAT estimates. Data are made available as open access via the Zenodo portal (Tubiello et al., 2025), with DOI 10.5281/zenodo.17395879.
Competing interests: At least one of the (co-)authors is a member of the editorial board of Earth System Science Data.
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