The global decline of biodiversity and ecosystem services is a development issue: Economies, particularly in low-income countries, cannot afford the risk of collapse in the services provided by nature. The analysis in this report, the first ofits-kind, shows that by a conservative estimate a collapse in select services such as wild pollination, provision of food from marine fisheries and timber from native forests, could result in a significant decline in global GDP: $2.7 trillion in 2030. Relative impacts are most pronounced in low-income and lower-middle-income countries, where drops in 2030
GDP may be more than 10 percent.

Nature-smart policies can reduce the risk of ecosystem collapse and are “win-win” policies in terms of biodiversity and economic outcomes. A combination of carefully crafted and coordinated policies, particularly those supporting innovation, can simultaneously benefit biodiversity and development.

The policies considered in this report reduce conversion of natural land and result in a general increase in global real GDP in 2030 that is estimated to be in the order of $50 billion to $150 billion.
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The more countries cooperate, the better the outcomes are. The global community needs to put in place measures to incentivize such cooperation and to support an inclusive transition for those stakeholders who are affected by the economic reforms and face opportunity costs.
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The nature and climate change agendas are complementary and there are synergies to be exploited to foster green, resilient, and inclusive development. The benefits of nature-smart policy increase substantially when the carbon sequestration services of nature are factored in. This analysis highlights the economic and environmental benefits
to be gained by aligning global, regional, and national policies that address biodiversity loss as well as climate change mitigation and adaptation and improve local livelihoods.

Seventy-five percent of the Earth’s ice-free land surface has been significantly altered by human activity; the abundance of vertebrate species has declined by nearly 70 percent since the 1970s (WWF 2020); and 14 of the 18 assessed categories of ecosystem services have declined over the same period (IPBES 2019). These trends threaten the well-being and development prospects of entire communities and economies, including those that need this natural capital the most—whether to grow out of poverty or remain resilient to natural and economic shocks.

30x30 goal is a proposed target in the draft post-2020 global biodiversity framework, defined as follows:
“By 2030, protect and conserve through well connected and effective system of protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures at least 30 per cent of the planet with the focus on areas particularly important for biodiversity.” (CBD Secretariat)

The integrated ecosystem-economy model is run to assess the opportunity cost of protecting 30 percent of the Earth by 2030 (referred to here as the “30x30 target”). Other high-profile projects (Waldron et al. 2020) assess a similar question. Building on that effort, this report captures general equilibrium effects and, in particular, assesses gross domestic product and welfare losses that result from price changes and efficiency losses when land is removed from production
(Table I.1). By directly incorporating a land supply curve parameterized uniquely for each agro-ecological zone (AEZ) and region in the GTAP-AEZ, the model used for this report provides a sophisticated tool to assess this question in a whole-economy framework.

The 2019 landmark report of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES 2019) attributes this to five direct “drivers of change” behind the unprecedented decline in biodiversity and ecosystem services: land use change, overexploitation,polution, climate change, and invasive species. The findings of the report include the following:
• Approximately 75 percent of the Earth’s ice-free land surface and 66 percent of itsmarine environment have been significantly altered; more than 85 percent of the area of wetlands has been lost since 1700.
• Between 1980 and 2000, 100 million hectares of tropical forests that are home to the highest levels of biodiversity were lost. Other sources point to a global loss of 178 million hectares of forests, an area the size of Libya, mainly to agricultural expansion from 1990 to 2020 (FAO and UNEP 2020).
• Live coral cover on reefs has nearly halved in the past 150 years, but the rate of decline has dramatically accelerated in recent decades, mostly because of climate change.
• Humans are using the biosphere as a sink for unprecedented amounts of waste.
• Cumulative records of alien species increased by 40 percent since 1980.

This publication was prepared by the Environment, Natural Resources and Blue Economy Global Practice of the World Bank by a team led by Giovanni Ruta. The other authors of the report are Justin Andrew Johnson, Uris Baldos, Raffaello Cervigni, Shun Chonabayashi, Erwin Corong, Olga Gavryliuk, James Gerber, Thomas Hertel, Christopher Nootenboom, and Stephen Polasky.