Forest loss is being driven by various factors, including commodity production, forestry, agriculture, wildfire, and urbanization. Curtis et al. used high-resolution Google Earth imagery to map and classify global forest loss since 2001. Just over a quarter of global forest loss is due to deforestation through permanent land use change for the production of commodities, including beef, soy, palm oil, and wood fiber. Despite regional differences and efforts by governments, conservationists, and corporations to stem the losses, the overall rate of commodity-driven deforestation has not declined since 2001. Global maps of forest loss depict the scale and magnitude of forest disturbance, yet companies, governments, and nongovernmental organizations need to distinguish permanent conversion (i.e., deforestation) from temporary loss from forestry or wildfire.

Compared with the planet's other large tracts of tropical forests, the forests in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have remained relatively intact -- although that soon may be changing. Driven by factors such as shifting cultivation (slash-and-burn agriculture), fuelwood demand, logging, mining, infrastructure development, population growth and migration, rates of forest loss in the African country have doubled over the past 15 years. Based on an application of machine learning, the study focuses on a specific set of the DRC's most intact forested areas identified as containing critical biodiversity habitat; it predicts that without intervention, at least 820,884 acres of these critical forests could be lost by 2025. The collective size of this predicted forest loss -- an area the size of Luxembourg within a country the size of Western Europe -- may be small, yet millions of people rely on these forests for food, shelter and medicine. This underscores an urgent need to use this study to inform smart land-use decisions in the DRC. Within the DRC, our research focuses on the landscapes prioritized by the Central Africa Regional Program for the Environment (CARPE), a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)-funded program implemented by WRI and other partners.