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Biodiversity policy beyond economic growth

Increasing evidence—synthesized in this paper—shows that economic growth contributes to biodiversity loss via greater resource consumption and higher emissions. Nonetheless, a review of international biodiversity and sustainability policies shows that the majority advocate economic growth. Since improvements in resource use efficiency have so far not allowed for absolute global reductions in resource use and pollution, we question the support for economic growth in these policies, where inadequate attention is paid to the question of how growth can be decoupled from biodiversity loss.

Global Futures: Assessing the global economic impacts of environmental change to support policy-making

This report summarises the first results of the Global Futures initiative – a partnership between WWF, the Global Trade Analysis Project and the Natural Capital Project – which has developed an innovative new model to calculate the impacts of nature’s decline on the world’s economies, trade and industry. The research is timely and poses a stark warning to us all – that unless we reverse nature loss, trillions of dollars will be wiped off the world’s economies, industries will be disrupted and the lives of millions will be affected.

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The issue of global biodiversity loss is so intense in the present era that it cannot be ignored as according to the reports of Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), due to human actions an average of around 25 percent of species in assessed ani