Nature is a direct primary source of food, clean water, and energy for many population groups lacking alternatives.
•1.2 billion people in tropical countries (30% of their population) are highly dependent on nature for basic human needs.
•Populations highly dependent on nature for their basic needs are most sensitive to environmental changes.
•Nature-based strategies must be carefully designed to promote inclusive human development.

Understanding where people depend the most on natural resources for their basic human needs is crucial for planning conservation and development interventions. For some people, nature is a direct source of food, clean water, and energy through subsistence uses. However, a high direct dependency on nature for basic needs makes people particularly sensitive to changes in climate, land cover, and land tenure.

Based on more than 5 million household interviews conducted in 85 tropical countries, we identified where people highly depend on nature for their basic needs. Our results show that 1.2 billion people, or 30% of the population across tropical countries, are highly dependent on nature. In places where people highly depend on nature for their basic needs, nature-based strategies that protect, restore or sustainably manage ecosystems must be carefully designed to promote inclusive human development alongside environmental benefits.

Our results indicate that around 1.2 billion people in the tropics, or 30% of people living in tropical countries, are highly dependent on nature to meet their basic human needs, defined here as directly relying on locally available natural resources for at least three of the four basic needs considered: housing materials, water, energy and occupation (Table S4). This number increases to 2.7 billion (or 69%) when we consider the people that are dependent on nature for at least one basic need (Fig. S6). There are important variations in the proportion of people that depend on nature across continents, countries, and sub-national regions (Fig. 1, Fig. 3). At the continental level, the largest number of highly nature-dependent people live in tropical Asia-Pacific (636 M or 27% of the total population in that region), followed by Africa (478 M or 48%) and the Americas (48 M or 9%).

The largest proportion of people who highly depend on nature per country is found in Africa (Fig. 1). A vast majority of people (greater than 75%) in several African countries highly depend on nature, especially in the central and eastern regions, including Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chad, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Central African Republic, Niger, and Madagascar.

In South-East Asia, a large proportion of people per country (greater than 40%) are nature-dependent, especially in Papua New Guinea, Cambodia, Laos and Timor-Leste. Another region in which countries have a large proportion of nature-dependent people (greater than 25%) is Central America, particularly in Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Africa has the largest continuous area with a high proportion of nature-dependent people, as more than 50% of people in all sub-national regions in many countries are highly dependent on nature (including Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Chad, Congo, Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Burundi and Rwanda). In contrast, several countries outside the African continent have many sub-national regions with a low proportion of highly nature-dependent people (e.g. in Indonesia and Brazil).