The trees cut down tile uses an annual estimate of 15 billion trees felled globally, spread evenly across the calendar year. It does not count individual trees with satellite imagery in real time.
How the counter works
- Start with 15,000,000,000 trees per year.
- Measure how much of the current calendar year has elapsed.
- Display that fraction of the annual total, updating continuously.
Logging seasons, agricultural expansion, and wildfire damage create uneven real-world patterns. The counter assumes a steady average rate for clarity.
Where 15 billion comes from
The figure is anchored to research led by Thomas Crowther, published in Nature (2015). That study estimated that roughly 15 billion trees are cut down each year, while about 5 billion are planted — a net loss of around 10 billion trees annually.
The count includes trees removed for timber, agriculture, urban development, and fuelwood, as well as forest lost to disturbances where regrowth may not follow. It is a global aggregate built from satellite data, national forestry statistics, and modelling — not a hand count of every stump.
Crowther’s wider work also estimated about 3 trillion trees on Earth today — far fewer than before human land use intensified — which helps contextualise why losing 15 billion per year matters.
What this number does not capture
- Net change vs gross felling — we show trees cut down, not the smaller net figure after replanting.
- Forest quality — replacing old-growth with monoculture plantations is not ecologically equivalent, but tonnage-based tree counts treat a sapling like a mature tree.
- Fire vs logging — natural and human-caused forest loss are combined in broad global estimates.
Why we show it anyway
Forests store carbon, regulate water, and harbour most of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity. The pace of removal is easy to ignore because it happens across continents and supply chains. The counter makes that loss feel continuous. Read it as a published global estimate of gross tree removal, not a live feed from every chainsaw.
Further reading
- Mapping tree density at a global scale (Nature / Crowther Lab)
- Global Forest Watch