Land Gap Report 2025: “Countries are doubling down on reliance on the land sector for carbon removal”
Forest policymaking needs to “confront the structural economic barriers that entrench extractive growth”.
Governments’ climate pledges under the Paris Agreement rely heavily on land-based carbon removal. This would require vast areas of land.
The Land Gap Report 2025 provides an updated assessment of the total area of land required in the Nationally Determined Contributions submitted to the UNFCCC up to November 2025. The pledged land for carbon removal is now more than 1 billion hectares. That’s an area of land larger than China.
This area represents an increase over the figures in the Land Gap Report 2022 and an update in 2023, which found that 990 million hectares of land would be needed to meet climate pledges submitted by the end of 2023.
The Land Gap Report 2025 is published by the University of Melbourne and its lead authors are Kate Dooley of the University of Melbourne and Kate Horner, an independent researcher.
The report states that, “countries are doubling down on reliance on the land sector for carbon removal to meet their pledges climate targets”.
A small number of large, high-emitting countries account for more than 70 percent of total land included in the pledges, indicating a continuing lack of ambition in reducing emissions from fossil fuels in the near term, instead placing reliance on the land sector later in the century.
These climate pledges rely on forest and land carbon removal to offset ongoing emissions from fossil fuels instead of limiting fossil fuel use and production.
Meanwhile forests and land remain under threat from continued extractivism. Most new climate pledges fail to uphold the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities to lands, territories, and resources.
Large areas of forests continue to be destroyed and degraded. In 2024, an area of 7.2 million hectares of forest was lost releasing 4 gigatons of CO₂ to the atmosphere.
Commodity-driven agricultural production and industrial logging are the largest drivers of deforestation and degradation, the report states. Agriculture and logging account for more than half of global forest loss.
There have been a series of failed initiatives in recent decades, supposedly aimed at addressing deforestation. The Land Gap Report 2025 notes that “these commitments and targets are often neither implemented nor achieved”.
The 2014 New York Declaration on Forests committed to eliminating deforestation from the production of agricultural commodities and to halving the rate of deforestation by 2020. Having failed to meet these targets, the Glasgow Declaration on Forests was signed by more than 100 governments at COP26 with a target to end forest loss and degradation of forests by 2030.
Forest loss and degradation continue. The Land Gap Report 2025 shows that there is an enormous gap between current climate pledges and stopping deforestation and degradation by 2030.
The report assesses the scale of the “forest gap” — that’s the gap between the 2030 targets and the actual plans that countries are putting forward in their NDCs and longer-term strategies:
Current pledges result in a ‘forest gap’ of almost 4 million ha of ongoing deforestation by 2030 — less than a 50 percent reduction on current rates; and almost 16 million ha of degradation — less than a 10 percent decline in current rates. Even with current COP30 pledges, this results in a remaining ‘forest gap’ of around 20 million ha projected to be lost or degraded each year by 2030, underscoring the inadequacy of planned policies and targets.
The report notes that explanations of the failure to end deforestation tend to focus on political will, financing, corporate commitments, and government capacity to implement decisions. Less often discussed is the current structure of global economic governance and how this pushes countries in the Global South into reliance on extractive industries.
Global economic governance structures form, at least in part, conditions for the persistent ‘land gap’ and the ‘forest gap’ revealed in this report: countries face enduring structural constraints that limit their ability to transition away from fossil fuels and extractive industries, resulting in a dependence on land-based removals to meet climate targets (the ‘land gap’). Meanwhile, these same political and economic pressures restrict tropical forest countries’ capacity to halt and reverse forest loss and degradation, while countries in the Global North take advantage of inequitable accounting rules to hide their own emissions (‘forest gap’).
The report points out that transforming these systems is essential for meeting climate and biodiversity goals. “This requires structural reforms in debt, fiscal and tax policy, trade, capital flows, and credit rating practices,” the report states.
Forest policymaking must move beyond market-based and voluntary instruments and instead confront the structural economic barriers that entrench extractive growth, advancing a reparative, rights-based global economy that serves the many rather than the few.
The report acknowledges that “the scale of this challenge remains immense” but also notes that countries in the Global South are becoming more forceful in calling for the reform of the global financial system. The report concludes that,
The rules of our economy are not laws of nature: they were made by people, and people can change them. Together, we can design a new economic model that protects the environment, strengthens communities and creates a fairer, more sustainable future for all.
At a side event presenting the report at COP30 in Belém, Nikki Reisch of the Center for International Environmental Law said it was important both to phase out fossil fuels and to protect and restore natural ecosystems. The recent International Court of Justice advisory opinion means that governments have a legal duty to take urgent and rapid action to stop the production and use of fossil fuels. “Further commodifying ecosystems” through carbon markets is not the answer Reisch said. Instead, we need “systemic, structural approaches to shift the climate and economic system”.