WEF Blog
July 8, 2020
[…] A comprehensive report, Protecting 30% of the planet for nature: costs, benefits and economic implications, has arrived just in time. It concludes that the benefits of protecting 30% of the world’s land and ocean outweigh the costs by a factor of at least 5:1. This economic assessment follows the urgent call from scientists to protect at least 30% of the earth’s land and sea by 2030 to halt the collapse of biodiversity.
The IMF estimates that $10 trillion has been spent so far on official COVID-19 support measures worldwide, and forecasts global GDP will contract by an unprecedented 4.9% in 2020. Protecting 30% of the world’s land and ocean would require just 0.016% of global GDP. This seems like a very low insurance premium and incredibly safe bet on a system that has proven its sound productivity for over 3 billion years.