Nature Loss Cannot Be Addressed Within an Economic Model Where Benefits and Burdens Are Not Shared Equitably

Carbon emissions mitigation to address climate change is a simpler problem to tackle than nature loss, and the struggle to create ‘first-best’ economic incentives is not over. With nature loss, the problem is spread out further through supply chains and requires more of a systems approach to align incentives at the front lines of nature loss, which can’t succeed without sharing the benefits as well as the burdens.

Climate change is often viewed as having one missing ‘price’, but in practice that solution has eluded our best attempts to find a ‘first-best’ outcome with a price on carbon; the sources of nature loss are more concentrated and have been disconnected from the gains created by the destruction of environmental r...