By: Staff Writer
December 8, 2023
The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) said in a new report that the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) could stand to lose up to $225bn in real GDP due to the loss of biodiversity due to conversion of natural lands to cropland.
The report, “Biodiversity as a driver of sustainable transformation in Latin America and the Caribbean,” said that a, “modelling exercise to estimate the cost of the collapse of wild pollination, marine fisheries and timber supply in native forests from 2022 to 2030 caused by the conversion of natural lands to cropland, pasture and forest plantations yielded a global real GDP loss in 2030 of between US$90bn and US$225bn (the variation depends on whether the associated value of carbon sequestration services is taken into account compared to a scenario with no change in nature’s services) (World Bank, 2021a). Furthermore, the authors warn that the damage will be greater if the global economy is not able to adapt quickly to the loss of ecosystem services, reinforcing the urgency of acting now. The results showed a real GDP loss for Latin America and the Caribbean of -3.3 percent.”
Human well-being depends to a large extent on the goods and services provided by biodiversity and its ecosystems, a concept known as “nature’s contributions to people” and also as “ecosystem services”. However, biodiversity processes are in many ways “silent” and “invisible” (hard to see), difficult to quantify at different levels (genes, species and ecosystems) and widely variable through time. This partly explains why modern human societies have not included nature as a strategic component in development planning, institutions and the market.
Unlike other processes, such as ozone thinning or climate change, which may yet be reversible, the biodiversity crisis in certain places is of such a magnitude that the accumulating changes in ecosystem richness, structure and function are at potentially irreversible levels or have already reached irreversibility.
Scientists, civil society organizations and governments have issued numerous warnings about the delay in prioritizing addressing the crisis of biodiversity loss and environmental degradation and have underscored the seriousness of its potential consequences. Inaction or insufficient action is due in part to the difficulty of implementing cross-cutting responses in a systemic manner. Although there are multiple policy instruments that address different areas of production and consumption individually, there has been a delay in the full implementation of those policies in the region (UNEP, 2020).
The report also said: “Studies with different future scenarios show that there are no winners if the current inertial approach continues —not acting is therefore not an option. Biodiversity loss and environmental degradation is a critical issue for Latin America and the Caribbean, given the region’s dependence on its extraordinary biocultural heritage for its development. Biodiversity is a fundamental asset that represents a large portion of a country’s national wealth. For example, in 2018 it was estimated that the bioeconomy accounted for between 12.8 percent and 15.7 percent of Costa Rica’s GDP. At the same time, the region is facing one of the highest levels of risk in the world to its marine, terrestrial and freshwater biodiversity
Achieving significant changes through a few transformations is not a realistic prospect. It is necessary to generate coherent and coordinated systems of change among different actors and at different levels, from global through regional and subregional to national and subnational. In this regard, the United Nations has called on all stakeholders to actively participate in transforming the global system.