Countries With the Most Rainforest, and Why Brazil, DR Congo and Indonesia Lead

The countries with the most rainforest are Brazil (about 4.94 million km² of forest), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (about 1.24 million km²) and Indonesia (about 909,000 km²), based on the UN Food and Agriculture Organization's 2022 forest-area figures for countries whose forests are mainly tropical moist forest. Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, Venezuela, Papua New Guinea, Gabon and the Republic of the Congo complete the top ten. No agency publishes an official "rainforest by country" table, so the ranking below uses each country's total forest area (FAO, 2022) and includes only countries where rainforest makes up most of it. That rule leaves out Russia and Canada, whose forests are boreal, and also Mexico, India and Angola, where dry, monsoon and temperate woodland make up a large share.

Brazil and Its Amazon Neighbours: Size Plus One Giant Basin

The simplest reason for Brazil's lead is size. Brazil has about 8.36 million km² of land, and the Amazon basin covers much of its north and west. The Amazon rainforest spreads over about 6 million km² of a 7 million km² drainage basin and is more than half of all the rainforest left on Earth. One breakdown of the rainforest by country puts 58.4% of it in Brazil, 12.8% in Peru, 7.7% in Bolivia, 7.1% in Colombia and 6.1% in Venezuela, with the rest in Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana and Ecuador. Five of the top seven countries in the table share this one forest. The Amazon holds an estimated 390 billion trees of about 16,000 species, and more than 30 million people live within it, including members of 350 ethnic groups and 3,344 recognised indigenous territories.

Brazil's total also overstates its rainforest. Its forest figure includes woodland in the Cerrado, a tropical savanna covering about 21% of the country, and the dry Caatinga of the northeast. Bolivia is similar: part of its forest is the Chiquitano dry forest, an ecoregion of about 230,600 km² shared with the Brazilian states of Mato Grosso and Rondônia. Peru's position, by contrast, rests almost entirely on Amazon lowland forest east of the Andes. Colombia adds a second rainforest, the Chocó on its Pacific coast, one of the wettest regions on Earth, where some towns average more than 11,000 mm of rain a year.

The Equator and the Congo Basin: DR Congo, Gabon and the Republic of the Congo

Latitude matters as much as size. True tropical rainforest grows mostly within about 10° of the equator, in climates with no real dry season: every month averages at least 60 mm of rain and more than 18 °C. Farther from the equator the rains become seasonal, and evergreen rainforest gives way to deciduous forest, woodland and savanna. So in every country in the table, the rainforest is concentrated in its equatorial or near-equatorial regions.

Central Africa's three entries share a cause: they straddle the equator, where heavy rainfall all year and high temperatures support evergreen forest. The Congolian rainforest is the world's second-largest tropical forest. It covers more than 2 million km² across six countries, including southeastern Cameroon, Gabon, the Republic of the Congo and the northern and central DR Congo, and holds about a quarter of the world's remaining tropical forest. It is home to more than 10,000 plant species and to forest elephants, chimpanzees, bonobos and lowland gorillas. Its central basin also contains one of the largest tropical peatlands on Earth, storing about 29 billion tonnes of carbon.

The DR Congo ranks second through sheer size, with 2.27 million km² of land, more than half of it forested. Gabon ranks ninth in area but has one of the highest forest shares of any country, between about 85% and 91% depending on the source, and it has made that forest central to national policy. In 2002 President Omar Bongo created all 13 of its national parks at once, covering about 10% of the country. In June 2021 Gabon became the first African country to receive payments for reducing deforestation and the emissions that come with it. The Republic of the Congo, about 64% forested, completes the African trio. A side-by-side look at the Amazon and Congo rainforests shows how differently the two basins are threatened.

Islands and Mountains: Indonesia and Papua New Guinea

In Southeast Asia, rainforest grows on islands rather than across a single basin. Indonesia's forests are spread over Sumatra, Kalimantan (its part of Borneo), Sulawesi and the western half of New Guinea. The country ranks third in the world for numbers of species, after Brazil and the DR Congo. History pulls its total down. Around 1900 forests covered about 84% of Indonesia, about 170 million hectares; by the end of the 20th century they covered less than 100 million hectares. Logging, much of it illegal, pulpwood and palm-oil plantations, and transmigration programmes that moved large populations into rainforest areas drove the loss. The Borneo rainforest shows the pattern most clearly. Indonesia still ranks third because its islands sit right on the equator and, taken together, cover about 1.89 million km² of land, nearly half of it still forested.

Papua New Guinea occupies the eastern half of New Guinea, the world's second-largest island at 785,753 km² and the island with the highest plant diversity on Earth. Its mountains rise steeply from lowland swamp and mangrove to alpine grassland, and that range of altitudes packs many forest types into a small area. The country shares the island with Indonesia, and the island's forests form the third-largest continuous rainforest in the world, after the Amazon and the Congo. Much of it is still standing: 79% of PNG's land is forested, the highest share in the top eight. The country holds roughly 5% of the world's known living species, with more than 2,000 orchid species and about 30,000 vascular plants. Even so, nearly a quarter of its rainforest was damaged or destroyed between 1972 and 2002, and about 15% was cleared completely.

Venezuela and the Guiana Shield: Old Rock and Small Populations

Much of Venezuela's forest lies in the southeast, in the Guiana Highlands east of the Orinoco, which also hold the northern fringes of the Amazon Basin. The highlands sit on the Guiana Shield, a block of ancient rock whose sandstone tablelands, the tepuis, rise sheer from the forest. Canaima National Park, established on 12 June 1962 and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, covers about 30,000 km² of this landscape. From the edge of Auyán-tepui inside the park, Angel Falls drops 979 m, the tallest uninterrupted waterfall in the world.

The same shield underlies the three Guianas, the most heavily forested territories anywhere. French Guiana, an overseas region of France, is 96.6% forest, Suriname 94.5% and Guyana 93.5%, according to the same FAO data. The shield carries the largest expanse of tropical forest on any Precambrian shield in the world, with 13,367 vascular plant species recorded, about 40% of them endemic. None of the three has enough land to reach the top ten by area, but by share of territory they lead the world, ahead of Gabon.

Deforestation and the Countries Left Off: Brazil's Losses, Myanmar, Mexico and India

The table measures what remains, not what has been lost. Brazil lost about 68.9 million hectares of tree cover between 2001 and 2023, around 13% of its tree cover in 2000, and in 2022 it accounted for 43% of all forest loss worldwide. Official figures put clearing in the Amazon biome at about 729,000 km², around 17% of its original extent. Conservation monitors reported that Amazon deforestation from January to early November 2023 was 56% lower than in the same period of 2022, mainly because of new policies in Brazil. The story of Amazon deforestation covers the causes in more detail.

Several large forest countries are missing from the table because of what kind of forest they have. Myanmar has about 279,645 km² of forest, more than Gabon, but it lies between 9° and 29° N, well outside the equatorial belt, in Asia's monsoon region, so it is treated here as a borderline case and left out. Mexico, with about 654,000 km², and India, with about 727,000 km², would both enter on total forest area, yet much of their woodland is dry tropical, pine–oak or monsoon forest, and their true rainforest is limited to areas such as Chiapas, the Western Ghats and the northeast. Angola, with about 655,000 km² of forest, lies mostly between 4° and 18° S, and most of its forest is drier woodland rather than equatorial rainforest. Counting only rainforest, the list is dominated by the Amazon and Congo basins and the islands of Southeast Asia and New Guinea.