A Brazil-led initiative that is pulling together a global roadmap to end deforestation will invite countries to produce their own voluntary pathways to halt and reverse forest loss by 2030, experts managing the process said this week.At last year’s COP30 climate summit in the Brazilian Amazon city of Belém, a group of around 80 countries led a failed push to start developing two new global roadmaps – one to stop deforestation by 2030 and another to transition away from fossil fuels. All countries signed up to these commitments in a landmark deal at COP28 in Dubai, but little progress has been made to implement them since then.As a bridging alternative, Brazil’s COP30 presidency agreed to draft two voluntary versions of these roadmaps. COP30 officials said a final version of the deforestation roadmap will be published by September this year, after receiving more than 130 written submissions from countries.This Monday, Juliano Assunção, executive director of Climate Policy Initiative/PUC-Rio in Brazil and an advisor to the COP30 presidency on deforestation, presented a first outline of the roadmap to countries at the United Nations Forum on Forests in New York (UNFF21).Assunção said the roadmap “will not prescribe a single model”, but would rather invite countries to translate commitments they have already made to halt and reverse deforestation by 2030 – which is a longstanding global goal – “into forest roadmaps grounded on regional and national diagnosis”.In 2025, the world lost 4.3 million hectares of tropical primary rainforest, an area roughly the size of Denmark, according to annual data published by Global Forest Watch. While that was 36% lower than in 2024 when climate-fuelled fires pushed forest loss to a record high, deforestation was still 70% higher than it should to be to meet the 2030 international pledge to end it, the report said.What will be in the roadmap?Assunção said the COP30 team “were positively surprised by the level of depth and how comprehensive” the contributions from countries and experts were in the consultation phase for the global roadmap, noting that these served to inform the current outline.The plan is for the global roadmap report to be structured in two parts: one on the social, economic and environmental risk of continued forest loss; and a second presenting a menu of options to tackle deforestation by 2030.“The roadmap will be practical, based on countries’ experiences. It will help identify the key challenges, and understand their drivers, which vary quite differently among different countries. It’s going to be drawing on existing policy tools,” Assunção told countries at the UN forests meeting this week.The COP30 advisor said that, while countries can draft national plans, there’s also “a lot of room for international co-operation”, which governments themselves requested as part of the consultation.The roadmap will include a sub-section on international co-operation, which will include how countries can share tools such as satellite platforms to improve monitoring systems, how to improve the finance architecture to channel more resources for forests, and how to align international regulations on trade, crime and due diligence to protect forests.Indigenous groups warn Amazon oil expansion tests fossil fuel phase-out coalitionMarco Tulio Cabral, a diplomat at Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs who leads the deforestation roadmap process, told governments that, while the document is not a negotiated outcome, the COP30 presidency is “investing a lot of time and effort” in talking with countries to “make as good a text as we can” that represents a range of views.He noted that, while the COP30 initiative for a fossil-fuel phase-out roadmap led to a coalition of countries that gathered for a first landmark conference in Santa Marta last month, a similar dedicated push is not necessarily expected for a deforestation roadmap.“The supportive actors and those who oppose it are very different, so there are limits to what we can do together or associate one thing with the other,” Cabral said.