Understanding the business case for nature conservation can be difficult.
Decisions about expanding conservation require a detailed analysis of the many co-benefits of nature and the balance between opportunity and cost. Expanding conservation is both a global and local consideration. To support decision makers, we evaluated the value of nature conservation at a hyperlocal scale. The new report maps areas where nature appears to have particularly high value and analyzes some of the co-benefits and costs that could result from conservation of these areas. These additional prioritized areas would effectively double the current conservation of land and national waters to 30% of the planet—a proposed UN target used as a reference point for this analysis.

As an anchor for our analysis, we use a global target proposed by the UN Convention on Biological Diversity: to protect 30 percent of the planet by 2030. But because tradeoffs are made at a local level, we used highly detailed, 5x5km geospatial analytics and assessed around 35,000 data layers in a six-million-pixel image of Earth. We developed six different scenarios to get to that 30 percent protected mark, each of which differed in the way they weighed opportunity costs or the interpretation of the 30 percent target as a national or regional target.

Understand the increasing risks from the loss of natural capital and identify conservation investments to help to mitigate these risks.

Where could natural capital provide the most value in reducing physical-asset risk?

What role should insurers play to better transfer and mitigate risk?

How can investments in natural capital be amplified through cross-sector collaboration methodologies such as the Jurisdictional Approach or Project Finance for Permanence?