The climate crisis is undermining the ecosystem services on which our economy depends. For the first time, WWF counts up the (monetary) toll of possible damages. And the result is staggering.
If humanity does not act quickly on the environmental crisis, the degradation we are already witnessing will become irreversible. And it will carry a stratospheric cost, even in purely economic terms. For the first time, this impact has been translated into money, arriving at a figure that is nothing short of astonishing: around 9 trillion euros by 2050. It would be like wiping out the economies of the United Kingdom, France, India and Brazil combined. This is the finding of WWF, which has dedicated the project Global Futures to this topic, conducted in partnership with the Global Trade Analysis Project and the Natural Capital Project.
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Climate change, extreme weather events, flooding, drought, soil erosion, and the extinction of animal and plant species: all these phenomena severely undermine the so-called ecosystem services that we all draw upon day after day, in ways more or less conscious. Consider, for example, the water used for drinking and irrigating fields, timber, fishing, the capacity of trees to store CO2, and the protection of coastlines from flooding and erosion. Or the precious work of pollination carried out by bees on apples, almonds, cocoa, tomatoes and many other crops that form the basis of our diet.
Starting from this premise, Global Futures estimates the changes these services will undergo, modelling them against different possible scenarios. It then assesses the consequences for GDP, trade, commodity prices (that is, basic goods such as timber, cotton and seeds) and other economic indicators. All of this across a scope of 140 countries.
The business as usual scenario — that is, the one in which companies, institutions and citizens continue along this path without major changes — amounts to a catastrophe for global development. The decline of the six ecosystem services already mentioned alone will cause GDP to fall by 0.67 per cent per year from now until 2050 (this is an average figure, benchmarked against a baseline scenario in which the supply of such ecosystem services remains unchanged). This is equivalent to a "gap" of more than 442 billion euros per year. Adding it all up, from 2011 to 2050, the total comes to 9,110 billion euros. With agriculture brought to its knees, a boom in the prices of essential goods must also be expected, such as timber (+8 per cent), cotton (+6 per cent), oilseeds (+4 per cent) and vegetables (+3 per cent). At the expense of the poorest sections of the global population, who will find it increasingly difficult to feed themselves. And these are, moreover, conservative estimates, since they account for only a limited number of factors.
Let us shift scenarios entirely and imagine that the international community finally bets on sustainable development, protecting the territories most valuable for biodiversity. In this case (which WWF calls global conservation) GDP will grow by 0.02 per cent per year, that is by 11 billion dollars, until 2050. Compared with business as usual, the global economy will gain more than 450 billion euros every year.
At first glance, it is natural to assume that it is primarily the poorest territories that are destined to suffer the damages caused by the collapse of ecosystem services. Yet, on this point too, the WWF study holds some surprises. Were the business as usual scenario to materialise, the economy of the United States would burn through more than 76 billion euros every year. This is the largest loss in absolute terms, roughly equivalent to Guatemala's GDP.
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"We cannot imagine a just and stable country and a prosperous economy if forests disappear, pollinators vanish, biodiversity collapses and rivers and the ocean are depleted," comments Rebecca Shaw, head of WWF's science team. The same applies to Japan (almost 74 billion dollars lost every year) and the United Kingdom (just under twenty billion). Turning to developing countries, the economies most at risk are those of Madagascar, Togo and Vietnam.
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"For many people it is difficult to grasp the true value of nature and the numerous benefits it offers to humanity," Shaw concludes. "This report translates the loss of natural capital into economic terms, linking them back to individual countries. It is a tangible and effective way to catalyse action on the part of companies and governments."
