Protecting a piece of land in the U.S. from chainsaws or plows might seem like a win for the environment. But as food and wood crisscross the planet through the arteries of international trade, such conservation measures can, paradoxically, lead to more harm than good.
As nations and conservationists push to protect up to 30% of their land by the end of this decade, scientists are calling attention to this often-overlooked side-effect of well-intentioned efforts. In papers published in mid-February in two of the world’s premier journals, Nature and Science, one group of scientists warned of the potential damage caused by these spillover effects while another team provided a detailed account of how this happens, thanks to our appetite for everything from avocados to vanilla beans.
“Developed nations are essentially exporting extinction,” said David Wilcove, a Princeton University conservation scientist and co-author of the new paper in Nature.
It’s widely recognized that agriculture is a primary driver of the world’s extinction crisis, and that demand in wealthy countries for everything from beef to chocolate to soybeans helps spur deforestation in biodiversity hotspots like Brazil. But measuring the ecological toll of this trade has proven tricky, given the complexity of the global economy. How do you draw a link between a vanilla farm in Madagascar and a bottle of vanilla extract at Whole Foods?
Wilcove and Princeton co-author Alex Wiebe tapped into a series of computer models to illuminate these connections. One computer program described by scientists at Japan’s Research Institute for Humanity and Nature linked money transfers in 15,000 industries spanning 190 countries to deforestation patterns down to the level of a city block, based on satellite images. The Princeton scientists examined how these patterns of deforestation overlapped the habitats of more than 7,000 forest-dwelling birds, mammals and reptiles.
The analysis revealed that goods such as food and timber imported to 24 of the world’s wealthiest countries are responsible for around 13% of the global decline in habitat for those species. Three quarters of those wealthy countries caused more biodiversity losses in other countries than in their own.
The U.S. ranked at the top, with its imports tied to more than double the total international habitat loss compared to second-place Japan. China was nearly tied with its island neighbor. Germany, France and the United Kingdom rounded out the top five. Places that suffered the greatest biodiversity loss due to this trade included parts of Central America and Brazil, southeast Asia, Madagascar and west Africa.
“By increasingly outsourcing their land use, countries have the ability to affect species around the world, even more than within their own borders,” said Wiebe. “This represents a major shift in how new threats to wildlife emerge.”
The research offers a detailed explanation of how national or local conservation measures could worsen biodiversity protections at the global scale. Fencing off potentially productive cropland or forests in wealthier countries that have less biodiversity could simply shift the damage to more ecologically rich places – often tropical countries with fewer environmental safeguards.
“Areas of much greater importance for nature are likely to pay the price for conservation efforts in wealthy nations unless we work to fix this leak,” said Andrew Balmford, a conservation scientist in the University of Cambridge.
Balmford is one of 22 scientists from Europe, and North and South America who described the problem in a Science paper titled “Time to fix the biodiversity leak.” The researchers noted that while the problem isn’t secret, it’s often overlooked. Claims about the benefits of land conservation in wealthy countries rarely account for this possible “leak” of production to more ecologically rich places. The recent international biodiversity agreement that set the 30% land protection target, the Global Biodiversity Framework, makes no mentioned of the problem.
“At its worst, we could see some conservation actions cause net global harm by displacing production to regions which are much more significant for biodiversity,” said Balmford.
The scientists say the risk of harm can be reduced, but it’s not simple. The habitat destruction can be eased by reducing demand for particularly land-intensive products, such as meat. Agricultural productivity could be increased in the home country or exporting countries, enabling people to grow more food on the same amount of land. Land protection could also target places where food and wood aren’t grown.
But before any of this happens, the problem needs to be acknowledged and accounted for in land conservation initiatives, the authors write. Now they can look to the work of their Princeton colleagues for tools to help quantify the problem.
Wiebe, et. al. “Global biodiversity loss from outsourced deforestation.” Nature. Feb. 12, 2025.
Balmford, et. al. “Time to fix the biodiversity leak.” Science. Feb. 13, 2025.
Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine
