From success to scale: Accelerating Asia’s and the Pacific’s progress in decoupling agriculture from deforestation
03/11/2025
Forestry leaders from across the Asia-Pacific region are convening in Chiang Mai, Thailand on 4-7 November 2025 for the Thirty-First Session of the Asia-Pacific Forestry Commission (APFC) and Asia-Pacific Forestry Week 2025 (APFW) - a major platform convened by FAO to drive collaboration, share innovations, and shape the future of forests in the region. Under the theme “Healthy forests feed the future”, more than 150 delegates from 24 countries are gathering to share their experiences and accelerate collaboration to harness forests’ full potential for a sustainable and food-secure future.
The session theme reflects the vital importance of forests in Asia and the Pacific. Forests directly enhance food availability by supplying a diverse range of wild foods and they generate income and employment from the sale of timber and non-wood forest products for more than 22 million people. They also foster stability by acting as a safety net during times of food scarcity or crisis and underpin sustainable agriculture through ecosystem services such as pollination, water regulation, and soil protection.
To this end, forests are essential to the livelihoods of people in Asia and the Pacific and key to the region’s agrifood systems. Asia’s and the Pacific’s forests further serve as critical carbon sinks and hosts of the region’s rich biodiversity, making them important allies for the achievement of global ambitions such as the Paris Agreement climate goals, biodiversity targets under the Kunming – Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the Sustainable Development Goals.
Asia and the Pacific shows promising signs as deforestation is declining
As forestry officials descend upon Chiang Mai, they have reasons to be proud. Newly available data from the Global Forest Resources Assessment (FRA) 2025 shows that Asia and the Pacific has consistently increased its forest cover since the year 2000. Over the past 25 years, the region has gained forests larger than the total land area of APFC host country Thailand, in part thanks to significant restoration efforts. The region has also seen a declining deforestation rate which has fallen from its peak in the 1990s when the region lost 4.6 million hectares of forests annually to 2.5 million hectares per year in the past decade. While the sharp decline is to be commended, it also shows that further action is needed to fully turn the tide on deforestation.
This is nowhere more evident than in the region’s primary forests. Only 15% of forests in Asia and 21% in the Pacific remain primary forests. These forests are naturally regenerating ecosystems composed of native species where there are no visible indications of human activities and where ecological processes have not been significantly disturbed. They hold special ecological importance as they are species-rich and diverse ecosystems that are vital to biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation.
To conserve these remaining primary forests and further reduce the region’s deforestation rate, it is of vital importance to address the drivers of forest loss. Unsustainable agricultural expansion, in addition to urbanization and infrastructure development, is the main driving force behind Asia’s and the Pacific’s deforestation. Various root causes are contributing to this, including an overall state of weak land governance, surging agricultural commodity demand, limited livelihood alternatives, insufficient monitoring and lacking incentives to maintain forest integrity.
A holistic targeting of these root causes holds the key to scaling Asia’s and the Pacific’s successes in reducing deforestation. By shifting from individual, incremental action to collective, systemic change, there is a real opportunity for agriculture and forestry leaders in Asia and the Pacific to decouple agriculture from deforestation and to chart a future in which healthy forests and agriculture mutually reinforce each other.
And the momentum is rising. Market-based regulations and supply chain initiatives increasingly shift agricultural demand towards responsible production. These shifts are bound to change the nature of production in Asia and the Pacific – a region that produces more than half of the world’s agricultural output and is the leading producer of key agricultural commodities like oil palm and natural rubber.
Impacts are already being seen as countries enhance their traceability and geolocation efforts and double down on ambitions to decouple agriculture from deforestation. Public-private collaboration between governments, producers, traders, consumer-facing companies and civil society is essential to secure an equitable burden and cost sharing. Collaboration will also be key in ensuring that the 380 million smallholders in Asia and the Pacific who depend on agriculture for their livelihoods are not left behind.
FAO continues to support countries in Asia and the Pacific to decouple agriculture from deforestation
FAO is actively supporting countries in the region on this journey. It does so in collaboration with key partners and in the context of several programmes – for example the UN-REDD Programme, the affiliated Aim4Forests and Aim4Commodities initiatives, projects funded by the Green Climate Fund (GCF), bilateral initiatives such as the Japan-funded BiG-CHANCE project, and Global Environment Facility (GEF) programmes like the GEF8 Southeast Asia and the Pacific Forests Integrated Programme. The latter is a six-year, USD 42.4 million-funded initiative, co-led by FAO and IUCN, that brings together governments, communities, and partners to conserve the region’s remaining primary forests and the essential ecosystem services they provide. The programme combines country-level action in Lao PDR, Thailand and Papua New Guinea, as well as regional and South-South collaboration and knowledge sharing, with the goal to strengthen governance to secure the long-term protection and sustainable management of these globally important forest landscapes.
Other support to countries includes work in Cambodia where FAO is providing technical assistance to the government and stakeholders in strengthening sustainable forest landscape management and commodities production decoupled from deforestation. In support of the country’s readiness for compliance with market-based instruments, FAO helps the country assess its policy and institutional readiness and supports the adoption of sustainable agricultural practices. In Cambodia, Indonesia and Vietnam, FAO also builds producer capacities on geospatial data production and analysis and supports the strengthening of traceability systems. In the recently approved Papua New Guinea GCF REDD+ results-based payment (RBP), FAO, as Accredited Entity and partner in implementation and execution, is supporting the country in reinvesting the RBP proceeds (USD 63.4 million) into strengthening forest governance and supporting sustainable livelihoods of customary landowners and vulnerable communities.
New knowledge and tools are also being produced to serve member countries and help advance the international agenda on halting deforestation. The “Solutions-tree: Solutions to halting deforestation through sustainable agrifood systems transformation” – to be launched by year’s end – is providing an overall framework of possible actions that stakeholders can take individually and collectively to advance systemic change in pursuit of a forest- and agriculture-positive future. The OECD-FAO Business Handbook on Deforestation and Due Diligence in Agricultural Supply Chains on the other hand provides good practice guidance for conducting deforestation-related due diligence. A recent workshop jointly organized by FAO, Preferred by Nature and the Global Platform for Sustainable Natural Rubber leveraged the Handbook to strengthen corporate due diligence capacities in the natural rubber sector.
Other elements in FAO’s toolbox of support include strategic dialogues and the strengthening of collaboration within and across countries to decouple agriculture from deforestation. A recent multistakeholder workshop in Bangkok is exemplary of this. The FAO-hosted regional event, co-funded by the UN-REDD Programme, the Japan-funded BiG-CHANCE project, the Aim4Commodities initiative and the GEF8 Southeast Asia and the Pacific Integrated Programme, brought together over 65 agriculture and forestry leaders from 10 countries across the Asia-Pacific region. Participants shared their perspectives on priorities, progress, challenges and opportunities for collaboration to reduce agriculture-linked deforestation and voiced strong interest in more intensive regional collaboration to tackle deforestation. This includes requests for further regional knowledge exchange and capacity building activities on priority issues such as traceability, innovative incentive and finance models, and agroforestry good practices.
As requested by participants, further dialogues are foreseen for 2026, to continue boosting the network of experts and dive deeper on selected topics.
Collaboration is critical for further progress
All this work reinforces countries’ already existing efforts which have led to a significant reduction in deforestation. But sustaining and scaling this progress will require stronger collaboration across governments, the private sector, civil society, and communities. By enhancing cooperation, technical exchanges and learning, there is a real opportunity to build upon existing successes in reducing deforestation and to scale up further systemic action to turn the tide on deforestation across Asia and the Pacific. This would not only enable more sustainable economies, agrifood systems and societies but also support the region’s healthy forests to feed the future.
