REPORT: Halve Humanity’s Footprint on Nature to Safeguard our Future

WWF (2021) Halve Humanity’s Footprint on Nature to Safeguard our Future 25 p.

19 August 2021. As United Nations biodiversity negotiations begin next week, a new report commissioned by WWF reveals that 39 million jobs could be created if governments reallocated just one year’s worth of subsidies that harm biodiversity to a nature-positive stimulus instead.

The Halve Humanity’s Footprint on Nature to Safeguard our Future report includes modelling which shows such jobs could be created if the $500 billion governments spend on harmful subsidies every year was diverted into employment which is nature-positive, meaning that it improves the state of nature.

“It is the imperative of our times to avert ecosystem collapse and the climate crisis but governments currently spend at least US$500 billion a year on subsidies for activities such as unsustainable agriculture or overfishing which damage nature, with disastrous consequences for society, the economy and our wellbeing. Not only would

reallocating this spending towards sustainable practices help to reduce the impact on biodiversity, it would also help us transition towards a nature-positive economy, and reform our current unsustainable production and consumption model. By re-directing these resources – and the world has shown through its response to the COVID-19 crisis that significant financial shifts are possible – we could set off a virtuous circle towards creating US$10 trillion in annual business value and 400 million jobs for the new nature-positive economy.” Marco Lambertini, Director General of WWF International. 

In 2020, the World Economic Forum’s Future of Nature and Business Report projected that ‘nature-positive’ solutions could create 395 million jobs by 2030 and $10.1 trillion in business opportunity. Several countries have already embarked upon just transitions towards a nature-positive economy which offer valuable lessons and inspiration.

WWF’s new report, produced by Dalberg Advisors, predicts that distributing this stimulus between countries equitably – that is, according to population, not economic strength – would create almost twice as many jobs as vice versa (39 million vs. 20 million). An equitable stimulus would thus also protect more biodiversity and help create green growth trajectories for less developed producer countries.