Global forest conservation policies and the Sustainable Development Goals

Forest conservation is widely heralded as a cost-efficient climate change mitigation strategy. Additional benefits of forest conservation include a range of ecosystem services including biodiversity conservation. But besides costs of governance and conservation payments, also opportunity costs should be considered, such as a potential decline in food production when protected areas are not available for agriculture. We therefore combine recent econometric estimates of impacts of national-level forest conservation policies with a Computable General Equilibrium model to assess existing forest conservation policies. We find that these policies cost a small fraction of gross domestic product and have quite limited effects on food security. As desired, they prevent large amounts of greenhouse gas emissions, mostly in form of prevented carbon stock losses, mitigating around twelve times the green house gases emitted globally in 2023. They also contribute considerably to biodiversity protection, despite increasing the intensity of land management. Given their small economic and social costs and wide-ranging environmental benefits, existing forest conservation policies are even more cost effective than previously thought.