Reports of the economic cost of global forest protection have been greatly exaggerated

Protecting earth’s remaining forests is central to achieving global climate and biodiversity goals, but is also thought to represent trillions of dollars of lost income (“opportunity costs”) for forest-land producers. To explore this tension, we applied partial-equilibrium models to three scenarios for protecting an additional 471–863 million hectares of forest under 30x30. These economically comprehensive models projected a modest bottom-line increase for forest-associated producers, strongly contradicting the results from current, simpler opportunity-cost approaches. This non-intuitive benefit is caused by the market effects of scarcity, similarly to how oil producers increase profit by reducing production. Current approaches greatly exaggerate large-scale opportunity costs because they ignore these market effects. Opportunity costs for other global environmental goals may be similarly overstated, causing unnecessary opposition.