While the first United Nations World Climate Conference to be held on the doorstep of the Amazon is in full swing, WWF is sounding a new alarm over the condition of the world's largest forest, pointing the finger, among others, at Italy's role. According to the environmental non-governmental organisation, our country is responsible for an enormous share of deforestation.

Five thousand football pitches razed in the Amazon every year for Italian consumption

The analysis is contained in a report entitled "Amazon Footprint Report 2025", published together with the non-profit organisation Trase, Chalmers University of Technology and the Stockholm Environment Institute, and was presented on Tuesday 18 November at COP30, currently under way in Belém, Brazil. According to the document, meeting Italian consumption needs results in the loss of four thousand hectares of forest every year — the equivalent of roughly five thousand football pitches.

WWF Climate and Energy ✓ @climateWWF

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🌴.@WWF and @Greenpeace have called for talk to turn to action at COP30, urging delegates to agree on a deliverable roadmap to halt and reverse deforestation by 2030.

🌳In a joint press conference today, they called for COP30 to adopt a Forest Roadmap.

Read more here:

♥ 4 18 nov 2025 · Apri su X →

The WWF report analyses the drivers of deforestation — that is, the activities that generate it — and, according to its authors, it represents the first document to carry out such an analysis on a cross-border basis. In the crosshairs are agro-industries in particular. These, led by beef production and followed by timber exploitation, "are associated with 8.6 million hectares of deforestation between 2018 and 2022", the report states.

Cattle ranching and agricultural crops in place of trees

More specifically, cattle ranching is by far the leading cause of deforestation among those linked to the production of raw materials, accounting for 78 per cent of the total (6.7 million hectares). In second place is soya cultivation, which is also particularly destructive but lags far behind, being responsible for just 4.6 per cent of tree clearing in the Amazon rainforest.

The phenomenon is, after all, plain for all to see. The report notes that, especially in the central-eastern Amazon — largely situated within Brazil's territory — forest is being cleared precisely to make way for livestock pastures. By contrast, in the portion spanning Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador, it is croplands that are expanding most rapidly, with maize, oil palms and other industrial crops leading the way.

The enormous impact of supply chains on the Amazon rainforest

These are products that frequently respond to demand coming from the nations of the Global North, the European Union included. "Global supply chains have an enormous impact," WWF notes. "On average, between 2020 and 2022 alone, EU member states were responsible for approximately 20 per cent of deforestation across a range of commodities." According to the environmental non-governmental organisation, demand for soya, maize and cocoa weighs most heavily in this regard.

wwfitalia @WWFitalia

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Mentre a #Belém #Cop30 si discute di come contrastare la #deforestazione e il #climatechange, l'#UE rischia di smantellare il suo contributo più significativo alla difesa delle #foreste:
Il regolamento #EUDR
wwf.it/pandanews/ambi…

♥ 7 18 nov 2025 · Apri su X →

The report also recalls that the Amazon rainforest has already lost 17 per cent of its extent over recent decades. This is a colossal problem also from the perspective of climate change mitigation, since forested areas are well known to absorb a fundamental share of the CO2 produced by human activities, starting with that generated by the burning of fossil fuels. "If we want to avoid the most dramatic global warming scenarios, we need to fundamentally rethink our production chains and consumption patterns."

The appeal to the European Union not to delay anti-deforestation measures

It is therefore "crucial that the European Union neither delays nor weakens the measures envisaged to combat deforestation. Any attempt to postpone or water them down would undermine the EU's credibility. This is the moment to show leadership, not to retreat," declared Edoardo Nevola, head of the forests office at WWF Italia, as reported by the Ansa news agency.