Nature loss is a planetary emergency. Humanity has already wiped out 83% of wild mammals and half of all plants and severely altered three-quarters of ice-free land and two-thirds of marine environments. One million species are at risk of extinction in the coming decades – a rate tens to hundreds of times higher than the average over the past 10 million years.

The World Economic Forum’s 2020 Global Risks Report ranks biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse as one of the top five threats humanity will face in the next ten years. Human societies and economies rely on biodiversity in fundamental ways. Our research shows that $44 trillion of economic value generation – over half the world’s total GDP – is moderately or highly dependent on nature and its services. Nature loss matters for most businesses – through impacts on operations, supply chains, and markets.

Despite an increasing focus on nature loss, there is still a limited understanding of why it matters to businesses and what the private sector can practically do about it. The World Economic Forum is launching a series of New Nature Economy (NNE) reports in 2020, making the business and economic case for safeguarding nature. The series aims to catalyse public-private momentum in 2020, with a focus on the UN Convention on Biological Diversity’s milestone summit (COP15) in Kunming, China, and the related Business for Nature mobilization.

Nature Risk Rising, produced in collaboration with PwC and the first report in the NNE series, explains how nature-related risks matter to business, why they must be urgently mainstreamed into risk management strategies and why it is vital to prioritize the protection of nature’s assets and services within the broader global economic growth agenda.

The series will span three reports that focus on the following priorities:
1.Make the case for why the nature crisis is crucial to business and the economy, including:
–The scale and urgency of the nature crisis
–The potential consequences for society if the crisis goes unchecked
–The interests of business to make the crisis a critical consideration
2.Identify a set of priority socioeconomic systems for transformation:
–Target areas in which individual and collective action from business and other actors (such as state-owned enterprises, investors and financial corporations) is urgent and indispensable
–Ecosystems that are closer to irreversible tipping points, and hence have more global relevance if tipped, and in which the drivers of degradation are more deeply connected to economic and business activities. Actors in this space therefore have more value at stake and a greater ability to influence the transformation.
3.Scope the market and investment opportunities for nature-based solutions to environmental challenges:
–Research solutions across the biodiversity, climate mitigation, climate resilience and ocean agendas
–Assess their economic and nature-building potential
–Identify areas and approaches that are most interesting for private-sector finance to engage in

Land degradation is affecting 3.2 billion people, and for far too long this has gone under the radar. This must change in 2020. If not, we risk that all the world’s topsoil be eroded in the next 60 years.

Healthy soil is a resource of incredible magnitude. It captures and stores water and carbon, increases biodiversity, and it preserves and increases food security.

The only way we can improve soil health is by really understanding human impact on nature and working with the farmer.