Global forest loss showed no measurable decline over a full decade of rising certification and expanding protected areas, and three decades of FSC and PEFC certification produced no statistically significant reduction in canopy removal across the countries where those schemes operate. That is according to a peer-reviewed study published in Nature’s Communications Sustainability by Chris Taylor, Maldwyn J. Evans, and Professor David B. Lindenmayer of the Australian National University’s Fenner School of Environment and Society.
Analysing 11 years of high-resolution satellite data across 91 nations, the team found annual global forest canopy loss oscillated between 21 and 32 million hectares per year, with total losses showing no directional trend. And those findings hold despite the PEFC-certified area growing from 262 million hectares in 2013 to 300 million hectares by 2023, and forest protection expanding from 868 million hectares to 990 million hectares.
It found that Russia (57 million hectares), Brazil (36 million hectares), Canada (34 million hectares), and the United States (23 million hectares) accounted for nearly half of all global forest canopy loss over the decade, with fire-related disturbances dominating in boreal zones including Russia and Canada whilst non-fire causes — industrial logging and agricultural land clearance — driving the bulk of losses across tropical nations including Brazil, the Congo, and Indonesia.
The certification gap.
Whilst FSC-certified forest area remained stable before declining after the 2022 suspension of certificates in Russia and Belarus, neither FSC nor PEFC coverage translated into meaningful reductions in canopy loss in the countries where they operate — an outcome that held even after the researchers controlled for country-level fixed effects and time-varying confounders: “Our results suggest limited effectiveness in reducing overall forest loss,” Taylor, Evans and Lindenmayer write, in findings they say must not be read as grounds for abandoning certification programmes altogether.
And protected areas fared little better in the modelling, with higher levels of protection showing no consistent association with lower canopy loss rates. The heterogeneity analysis found that protection is less effective in countries under high wood extraction pressure, with the model showing a positive interaction between protected area status and both industrial roundwood and fuelwood production density for non-fire-related forest loss.
What the data did find.
For non-fire forest loss, the two strongest positive predictors in the panel data model were industrial roundwood production density and fuelwood production density, with global roundwood production rising significantly across the decade and fuelwood production growing even faster. GDP per capita was the only predictor to show a consistently negative association with forest loss across both fire and non-fire categories, with lower-income nations accounting for a disproportionate share of non-fire canopy loss across the study period.
It comes as Australian certified timber exporters, alongside supply chain operators across Southeast Asia, South America, and Central Africa, face direct exposure to the European Union’s Deforestation Regulation. The ANU findings directly challenge the underlying premise of that regulation — that supply chain traceability and certification can arrest forest loss at scale.
Taylor, Evans and Lindenmayer stop short of calling for the scrapping of FSC or PEFC altogether; however, they instead point to the growing evidence that Indigenous-led forest management outperforms certification and formal protection, with cited research finding that Key Biodiversity Areas on Indigenous Peoples’ Lands experienced significantly lower tree cover loss than those outside. As a result, they are calling for certification to be expanded alongside Indigenous land management and formal protected areas, particularly in forest areas outside wood production zones where certification currently has no mandate.
The study didn’t look inside certified forests — and that matters.
A forest certification expert who spoke to Wood Central on condition of anonymity raised a pointed methodological challenge, questioning whether the study’s country-level framework could fairly assess the schemes’ on-the-ground impact.
“The study draws a number of conclusions about forest certification and its role in reducing forest loss across a very large sample size,” the expert told Wood Central, noting that with less than 10 per cent of the world’s forests certified under either scheme — a figure that fell further after Russia and Belarus were suspended from FSC and PEFC following the invasion of Ukraine — the national-level signal is inherently diluted.
“Just because a country has a private forest certification scheme operational, it doesn’t mean that all forests in those countries participate in the scheme,” they said, adding that the study did not compare forest loss inside certified forests against those that sit outside certification entirely. “It would be very interesting to see if there was a major difference in forest loss between forests that are certified and those that are not,” they told Wood Central.
- For more information: Taylor, C., Evans, M.J. & Lindenmayer, D.B. Forest loss persists despite certification and protection. Commun. Sustain. 1, 58 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44458-026-00055-5
