What works: three countries that moved the number

The world spends US$7.3 trillion a year against nature and US$220 billion for it. Most of what is written about that ratio is about the first number. This note is about the second, and about three countries that made it move, each with a mechanism small enough to copy.

Costa Rica: a fuel tax that bought a forest back

In 1987 forest covered as little as 40% of Costa Rica, after decades of clearing for cattle and crops. Today it covers close to 60%. The country did not achieve that with a ban. In 1997, under a forestry law passed the year before, it began paying landowners for the environmental services their trees provide: carbon, water, biodiversity and scenery. The money came mainly from a tax on fuel sales, topped up by private firms and, later, by carbon payments. In 2022 Costa Rica received its first US$16.4 million from the World Bank's carbon fund for 3.28 million tonnes of emissions it had kept in the trees in 2018 and 2019.

What makes it copyable is the plumbing. A fuel tax is collected anyway. Routing a slice of it to standing forest turns a general revenue line into a purchase of something the rest of the economy depends on, and it does so through contracts with private landowners rather than through land the state has to own. The forest came back because keeping it became a source of income rather than a cost of not clearing it.

Seychelles: a small debt swap that protected a sea larger than Germany

In 2016 Seychelles exchanged US$21.6 million of foreign debt for a commitment to finance marine conservation at home, the first debt-for-nature swap built around an ocean rather than a forest. The money went into a trust, the Seychelles Conservation and Climate Adaptation Trust, which pays for the country's marine spatial plan and for grants to the people who fish and work its waters. On 26 March 2020 the government announced the last of the areas that took its ocean protection from 0.04% of its exclusive economic zone to 30%: 410,000 square kilometres, an area larger than Germany, fully or significantly safeguarded.

The number to notice is the first one. US$21.6 million is a rounding error in sovereign finance. It worked because it was attached to a plan, a trust that outlives governments, and a measurable target with a date. The larger conversions that followed, in Belize, Gabon, the Galápagos, El Salvador and Ecuador's Amazon, copied that structure with more zeros.

Namibia: a fifth of the country, owned by the people who live there

Namibia wrote community conservation into law in 1996. Rural communities that form a conservancy gain the right to manage, and to earn from, the wildlife on their communal land. There are now 86 registered conservancies covering 166,184 square kilometres, about a fifth of the country, home to roughly 245,000 people. In 2017 the programme generated N$132.8 million in returns and benefits, including the value of harvested meat, through 54 joint-venture lodge agreements and 56 conservation-hunting agreements. Not every conservancy pays its way: 69 of the 86 generated returns that year and 39 covered their own operating costs. That honesty is part of why the model has lasted.

The mechanism here is ownership. Wildlife on communal land was worth nothing to the people living beside it until the law made its income theirs. Once it was, elephants, lions and rhino became assets that a village had reasons to keep alive, and the land stayed open rather than fenced and ploughed.

What the three have in common

None of the three waited for a global price on nature. Each found a payment that already existed, a fuel tax, a debt service bill, a tourist's spend, and re-routed part of it to the living system that the payment quietly depended on. Each wrote the arrangement into law or into a trust so that it survived the government that signed it. And each published a number, forest cover, square kilometres, income to conservancies, that could be checked, which is why they can be written about here with their sources.

The US$220 billion a year that the world invests in nature is not a big number. It is, though, made of items like these, and every one of them started as a decision somebody could have not taken.