Land-use emissions have fallen 30% this century: what drove it

Story: 2026 C.E. | Last updated: August 22, 2026

One of the quieter climate victories of the 21st century is now documented in a peer-reviewed report: emissions from deforestation and land-use change have dropped roughly 30% compared to their 2000s average, driven by policy shifts in Brazil, Indonesia, and China’s sweeping reforestation programs. The finding comes from the 2025 Global Carbon Budget, formally published in May 2026 C.E. in the journal Earth System Science Data.

At a glance

Land-use emissions: The Global Carbon Budget estimates net land-use change emissions averaged 5 GtCO2 per year over 2015–24 — around 23% lower than the 1995–2004 average and 19% lower than 2005–14.
Deforestation slowdown: Brazil and Indonesia have both reduced tree clearance significantly, with those two countries plus China’s reforestation programs together reshaping the global trajectory.
Forest regrowth: Over 2015–24, sequestration from reforestation and afforestation offset two-thirds of deforestation emissions — removing an average of 4.76 GtCO2 per year against the 6.96 GtCO2 released by deforestation alone. The net figure is higher because it also counts peat drainage, peat fires, wood harvest, and other land-use transitions.

Why land-use emissions dropped

For roughly four decades up to the late 1990s, global land-use emissions stayed relatively flat at around 6.6 GtCO2 per year. The turn came after that, as deforestation rates — particularly permanent deforestation, the full conversion of forest to farmland, mines, or cities — began to ease.

The Global Carbon Budget attributes the steepest recent drop to two compounding forces: a peak in peat-fire emissions in 2015 that then subsided, and a long-term decline in deforestation in many countries from 2010 to 2020. Preliminary data in the report puts 2025 C.E. land-use emissions at 4.1 GtCO2 — below the 2014–25 average, even as fossil fuel and cement emissions hit a new high of 38.1 GtCO2.

Prof. Pierre Friedlingstein, director of the Global Carbon Budget office at the University of Exeter, told Carbon Brief that the trend is “going in the right direction,” while adding: “If you are optimistic, you hope the trend will not reverse and start increasing again. But we don’t know for sure.”

Brazil’s policy reversal and Indonesia’s peatland work

Brazil is the single country most responsible for both the early-2000s peak in global land-use emissions and their subsequent decline. Deforestation in the Amazon surged in the 1990s, then fell sharply after a 2004 action plan, a 2006 soy moratorium banning purchases of soy from deforested Amazon land, and major expansions of protected areas later that decade.

Friedlingstein noted that the trend in Brazil was “mainly due to politics” — shifting between Lula da Silva and Jair Bolsonaro administrations — but that “the long-term trend in Brazil is a decline in deforestation due to forest protection policies.”

Indonesia’s contribution to the recent acceleration in the decline is striking. Prof. Julia Pongratz, a professor of physical geography and land-use systems at the University of Munich and a contributor to the Global Carbon Budget, noted that Indonesia has “rewetted more peatland area since 2017 alone than Europe in its entire history.” Peatland rewetting restores water levels in drained peatlands, returning them to carbon-storing, waterlogged conditions. Fewer fire spikes related to land-use activities have also helped lower Indonesia’s emissions over the last decade.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo presents a harder case. Unlike Brazil and Indonesia, where deforestation is tied heavily to export commodities and responds to international trade regulations, the DRC’s emissions are driven more by population growth and subsistence farming. Pongratz noted that “international regulations aiming at curbing deforestation thus have larger effects” in export-driven economies. This story is one of many climate progress milestones where uneven geography reminds us the work is far from finished.

China, the EU, and the US are pulling carbon back down

While reduced deforestation has cut emissions, reforestation and afforestation have added a powerful counterweight. The Global Carbon Budget reports that China, the E.U., and the U.S. collectively removed 1.1 GtCO2 per year through forest growth over 2015–24.

China’s contribution stands out. A raft of reforestation and improved land management policies introduced in the 1990s led to the rehabilitation of tens of millions of acres of forests. Research cited in the report shows these programs have switched China’s land from a net carbon source to a net carbon sink — its land-use emissions have now dropped below zero.

Of the 4.76 GtCO2 removed annually by forests over 2015–24, just under half — 2.2 GtCO2 — came from active afforestation and reforestation efforts. The remaining 2.56 GtCO2 came from natural forest regrowth after shifting cultivation, where land farmed briefly is then abandoned and forest recovers on its own.

Real progress, real uncertainty

The data carries important caveats. The Global Carbon Budget estimates an uncertainty range of 2.6 GtCO2 per year around its 5 GtCO2 average — more than half the figure itself. Land-use emissions are calculated by averaging three separate bookkeeping models: BLUE, OSCAR, and LUCE. These models agree reasonably well on permanent deforestation but diverge on shifting cultivation and wood harvesting.

The report also notes its confidence in the 2025 projection remains “low,” since figures for the most recent years rely on proxies for deforestation, degradation, and peat fires rather than full land-use statistics. And the broader picture is sobering: even as land-use emissions have fallen, fossil fuel and cement emissions have risen from an average of 11 GtCO2 in the 1960s to 35.9 GtCO2 over 2015–24, meaning the overall carbon budget has continued to grow.

The direction of land-use trends is nonetheless real and, for once in climate data, genuinely encouraging. It connects to a broader shift in global emissions momentum that climate scientists have been watching closely. Whether those trends hold under political and economic pressures — in Brazil, in the Congo Basin, in the world’s remaining frontier forests — is the question the next Global Carbon Budget will have to answer.

For more on this story, see: Carbon Brief — Why land-use emissions have fallen by a third this century, in six charts

For more from Good News for Humankind, see:

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