Last year an area of the world's forests larger than Scotland was cleared primarily to make way for agriculture, according to an annual deforestation assessment by a broad global coalition of researchers and activists.

Tropical primary forests -- particularly carbon rich and ecologically biodiverse environments -- were the hardest hit, with 6.7 million hectares (16.6 million acres) lost in 2024.

The report also highlighted persistent but overlooked levels of forest degradation, where land is damaged but not razed entirely, mostly owing to logging, road building and fires lit to clear land.

Rates of deforestation remain stubbornly high despite a commitment made by more than 140 leaders at the UN COP summit in 2021 to stamp it out by the end of the decade.

"Deforestation has not meaningfully declined since the beginning of the decade, and we're already halfway through," Erin Matson, an expert at the Climate Focus think tank and co-author of the latest assessment, told reporters.

"Every year we are losing this level of forests."

Deforestation worldwide in 2024 was 3.1 million hectares above the maximum possible level to align with meeting the 2030 goal, the report said.

Globally, deforestation is overwhelmingly driven by the expansion of permanent agriculture, which accounted for 85 percent of all forest loss over the past decade.

"But another important and growing driver is mining and extractives for gold, for coal, and increasingly for the metals and minerals required for the renewable energy transition," Matson said.

- 'Forest COP' -

Matson said she was cautiously optimistic the cause could be revived at next month's COP30 summit in Brazil, the first time the annual UN climate conference has been held in the Amazon region.

"This is the forest COP. I think there's a lot of opportunity there," she said.

Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva chose to host the world's most important climate talks in Belem, the gateway to the Amazon, to spotlight the role of forests in absorbing carbon dioxide.

At COP30, Brazil will launch an innovative new fund that rewards countries with high tropical forest cover -- mostly developing nations in Asia, Africa and Latin America -- that protect trees rather than chopping them down.

The Tropical Forests Forever Fund (TFFF) aims to raise up to $25 billion from donor countries and another $100 billion from the private sector, which is invested on financial markets. Brazil has already thrown in $1 billion.

"What is new about this initiative... it's the scale, it's the simplicity, it's the long-term vision, and it's the leadership of the Global South," said Elisabeth Hoch, international portfolio lead from the Climate and Company, a think tank.

"From a political point of view, the initiative has a lot of value but it has not yet reached a stage of maturity sufficient to be fully launched," said a French government source on Friday.

Matson said "political courage" was needed at COP30 to correct course and put the fight for forests back on the global agenda.

"Looking at the global picture of deforestation, it is dark, but we may be in the darkness before the dawn," she said.