The World Economic Forum (WEF) has released the first in a series of three New Nature Economy (NNE) reports to be published this year. The series will make the case for why the nature crisis is crucial to business and the economy; identify a set of priority socioeconomic systems for transformation; and scope the market and investment opportunities for nature-based solutions to environmental challenges.

Titled ‘Nature Risk Rising: Why the Crisis Engulfing Nature Matters for Business and the Economy,’ the first report presents four chapters discussing the nature emergency, the risks of nature loss to businesses, how to manage these risks, and how to take action. The publication’s appendix offers an approach to modelling nature dependency for countries and sectors.

In their foreword, Dominic Waughray, Managing Director, Managing Board, World Economic Forum and Celine Herweijer, Global Leader, Innovation and Sustainability, PwC, United Kingdom, note that “every industry sector has some degree of direct and indirect dependency on nature” and identify nature loss as a “fat-tail risk like the 2008 asset-price bubble.” They point out that pursuing a “nature-positive way of doing business” can mitigate future economic and societal shocks. 

Nature loss is a “fat-tail risk like the 2008 asset-price bubble.”

The report goes on to discuss how risks to nature manifest as risks to business across all sectors. They highlight the report’s findings, which indicate “that $44 trillion of economic value generation – more than half of the world’s total GDP – is moderately or highly dependent on nature and its services and is therefore exposed to nature loss.”

The report follows on the heels of the WEF’s Global Risks Report, which for the first-time in the report’s 10-year history listed the top five risks in terms of likelihood as environmental.

The NNE series, which is produced in collaboration with PwC, is being developed under the umbrella of the WEF’s Nature Action Agenda, a platform for mobilization and support in the lead up to the UN Biodiversity Conference in October 2020, at which time a new global biodiversity framework is expected to be adopted. [Publication: Nature Risk Rising: Why the Crisis Engulfing Nature Matters for Business and the Economy]