Abstract Despite decades of global efforts to conserve natural forests, deforestation continues to surpass international conservation targets1–3, highlighting the need for efficiently measuring the success of conservation actions. This is challenging because it remains unclear how deforestation would have changed without policy efforts to reduce it4–6. Here, we model an alternative past for 28 countries in which land managers make unconstrained deforestation decisions, solely based on heterogeneous agricultural profit expectations. We show that observed deforestation patterns differ from this counterfactual in the world’s deforestation hotspots. Relative to the counterfactual, deforestation was reduced in Latin America (-18%) and Asia (-8%), but increased in Africa (+6%), suggesting an overall reduction of past global deforestation rates. While only a few countries with effective forest conservation policies have achieved substantial deforestation reductions 7–9, other countries, such as Malaysia, Madagascar, and Paraguay, exceeded the profit-oriented counterfactual due to drivers unrelated to agricultural profits. These results demonstrate that forest protection against profit-oriented deforestation is possible at a global scale. Consistent counterfactual deforestation baselines, such as those generated by our simulation approach, are essential for robust and reliable assessments of forest conservation achievements10–12 and provide a stronger foundation for future forest policy.
Knoke et al. (Wed,) studied this question.