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+20 per minute · since 00:00 UTC
This is a live, continuously changing estimate. It isn't printed here because a figure on paper would be wrong the moment you read it — see the current value at https://earthnow.app/signal/forest-cleared-today.
Estimated, not measured
Forest loss is counted in hectares because area is what a satellite can see. What is actually lost — soil that stays put, rain that falls downwind, species with nowhere else to be — has no unit.
Estimated hectares of forest cover removed since midnight UTC. A hectare is about one and a half football pitches.
Nobody counts this as it happens. EarthNow takes a published figure for the whole day, divides it by the 86,400 seconds in a day, and multiplies by the seconds elapsed since midnight UTC. So the value climbs smoothly and is the right order of magnitude — but the smoothness is arithmetic, not observation. Nothing happening in the world is being watched in real time.
value = daily total ÷ 86,400 × seconds since 00:00 UTC
A consequence worth knowing: the counter resets at midnight UTC, not at your midnight. And because the figure advances at a constant rate, this page cannot tell you whether today is unusual. For that you need a measurement.
10.9 million hectares of forest cleared a year over 2015–2025, down from 17.6 in the 1990s.
The figure is theirs; the running total is ours. Cite them for the number, and EarthNow for what it looks like as it accumulates.
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