- Governments are drawing up plans to support economic recovery in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Nature and biodiversity are mostly neglected in existing stimulus packages.
- Globally, economic stimulus funding that is harming nature exceeds that benefiting it.
- Unless stimulus is redirected to nature, recovery investments risk exacerbating the biodiversity and climate crises and ultimately damaging economies.
- To prevent this, governments should ensure that economic investment in response to COVID-19 does no additional harm to nature, and direct at least 10% of the overall recovery investment to protecting and restoring nature.
Nature is a source of economic prosperity for many countries, especially those that rely heavily upon it for resources and production. Investment in nature can create jobs, aid economic recovery, bring economic benefits for society, and support nature-based solutions to global goals. Nature, for example, increases the resilience of countries to climate change, helps reduce the risk of disasters, protects human health, and improves water and food security.
El Salvador: comparison of job creation per USD 1 million injected into various industries (Source: IUCN)
Investment in nature provides effective policy options to create jobs and support socio-economic development. For example, IUCN found that forest landscape restoration in El Salvador created approximately 50 jobs per USD 1 million invested in ecosystem restoration. This is more jobs than were created by a similar investment in the manufacturing sector amongst others, and these jobs were concentrated in rural and low-income areas.
Unlike many other sectors, the benefits of these jobs can support those who the pandemic has hit hardest. For example, the jobs created from Rwanda’s efforts to restore forests under the Bonn Challenge accrued roughly equally between women and men, with women gaining 49% of the short-term jobs and 46% of the long-term jobs.
This is important because worldwide women are over-represented in informal and vulnerable employment that has been particularly impacted by the pandemic.
Photo: Community restoration projects support the Rwanda government's pledge to restore two million hectares as part of the Bonn Challenge. © IUCN
In addition to creating more than 60,000 jobs planting trees to support unemployed workers due to the pandemic, Pakistan has created about 5,000 jobs specifically for young people through projects to expand protected area coverage and list national parks on the IUCN Green List of Protected and Conserved Areas.
To mitigate the expansion of the Sahara Desert, the Great Green Wall Initiative aims to provide food security for 20 million people, create 350,000 jobs and sequester 250 million tonnes of carbon by 2030.
The Initiative, a partnership of 21 African countries and international organisations, restored approximately 18 million hectares of land, created over 350,000 jobs, and generated around USD 90 million between 2007 and 2018.