Context

The world economy will suffer a total cumulative loss of $10 trillion by 2050 unless humanity reverses destruction of nature, a report released by WWF.

About

• The report titled “Global Futures: Assessing The Global Economic Impacts of Environmental Change To Support Policy-Making”, has been prepared jointly by the World Wide Fund for Nature, The Global Trade Analysis Project and the Natural Capital Project.
• However, annual global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) will be 0.02 percent higher by 2050 if the world adopted a more sustainable model of living.

• Importance of nature:
• Nature provided humanity with key ‘ecosystem services’. These include:
  • Pollination of crops
  • Protection of coasts from flooding and erosion
  • Supply of water
  • Timber production
  • Marine fisheries
  • Carbon storage
• However, the ‘natural assets’ that provided these services — forests, wetlands, coral reefs and fish stocks — were under attack from the globe’s human population in the name of unsustainable economic development.

Outcomes of the report:

• Human actions were resulting in climate change, extreme weather and flooding, water shortages, soil erosion and species extinctions.
• Disasters in 2019 including the heatwave in India and Europe, fires in the Amazon and Australia, floods in various parts of India, extreme water scarcity in Chennai as well as animal extinctions.
• The research analysed how the natural assets would change under various future development scenarios and how the consequent changes in ecosystem services, would, in turn, affect the global economy.
• Two scenarios were presented in the report.
  • First scenario: In the first, things would be ‘business-as-usual’.
    • In such a situation, reduced supply of the six ecosystem services would lead to a 0.67 per cent drop in the annual global GDP by 2050.
    • That would be equal to an annual loss of $479 billion and the total cumulative loss of $9.87 trillion in the period between 2011 (the base year for the study) and 2050.
  • Second scenario: In the second scenario, if the world adopted a more sustainable model of development and safeguarded biodiverse areas, the annual global GDP would be higher by 0.02 percent $11 billion, by 2050, “than in a baseline scenario of no change in ecosystem services, generating an annual net gain of $490 billion per year compared to the business-as-usual scenario”.

There is a need for transformational change across the world’s economic and financial systems so that they deliver long-term sustainable development and protect and restore nature.