Across 146 countries, researchers found that most landscapes hold far more room for compromise than expected.
This provides benefits for both biodiversity and local economies at the same time.
The team modeled how economies and nature interact, aiming to test a stubborn assumption.
The usual pushback against fighting climate change or protecting biodiversity is that it costs too much.
Land sits at the center of both crises, since its use decides how much carbon stays put and how many species survive.
A broad review of the evidence ranks land use as the leading cause of wildlife loss worldwide.
The same ground stores much of the carbon that drives global warming, so one choice steers nature, climate, and income together.
Mapping the choices
To see what was possible, the team mapped the best each country’s land could do, a ceiling they call an efficiency frontier.
It marks the maximum a nation could achieve across all its goals simultaneously, given its soils, climate, and how the land is used now.
They scored each stretch of land on five possible payoffs. Two were natural, the carbon storage a place provides and the life it can hold.
The rest were economic, the value of crops, grazing, and timber. Switching land between uses is not free, so the model added the price of each change.
The result was a map for each country, charting the gap between what its land yields now and what it could realistically reach.
Gains on both
Until this analysis, no one had mapped those frontiers for nearly every country or gauged how far each falls short.
The pattern was hard to miss. Most nations work their land well inside what is achievable, leaving gains untouched.
Add the 146 countries together and the scale appears. If countries prioritized climate benefits, their land could lock away more than 200 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide.
If they prioritized economic returns, farming and forestry could generate more than $350 billion in additional income. Neither gain would come at the other’s expense.
On average, a country could nearly double what it pulls from one side without losing ground on the other.
Two ways forward
Two kinds of change drive those gains. The first reshuffles where activities sit, restoring forest on plots that hold heavy carbon and shelter wildlife yet earn little as farmland.
Crop intensification offers the second route, coaxing more food from land already farmed.
In many poorer countries, fields yield far less than they could, a gap an analysis of the world’s croplands mapped years ago.
When it is narrowed, the same acres feed more people and no fresh ground is broken.
Both routes pay off most where land is worked least efficiently, often in lower-income countries with room to gain everywhere.
Wealthier nations have fewer easy gains, having already extracted much of the economic value available from their land.
Japan and Haiti
The country profiles told sharply different stories. Japan has drawn down much of its natural wealth, the team found, yet it squeezes nearly the most economic output its land can give.
Haiti sits in the opposite corner. It has spent a similar share of its natural wealth but gets far less back, well short of what the same land could provide.
The contrast carries a hopeful message. Running down forests and soils does not doom a country to a weak economy.
It reflects a poor return today, not a permanent limitation. How the land is managed, not how much survives, decides the outcome.
Guiding the money
This kind of map is built for finance development. Banks and lenders can use the maps to identify which investments would raise incomes while storing carbon and protecting habitat.
“We show people what’s possible, and that tends to open their minds to thinking about a wider set of alternatives,” said Polasky.
For him, part of the value is changing the conversation. But the picture is not complete.
The model covers only land, leaving out rivers and lakes, and does not fully account for people’s tendency to favor short-term gains over long-term benefits.
Even so, it lines up with a study showing better land care could supply much of the climate fix the world needs.
What this opens up
The world now has a country-level account of how much more its land could deliver, drawn for 146 nations at once.
The headline is plain. For most countries, the clash between a healthy economy and a healthy planet is far less severe than commonly assumed.
That reading hands governments and investors a concrete target, not a vague hope.
Efforts to protect a third of the planet’s land by 2030, called 30 by 30, can use it to find where conservation and livelihoods rise together.
For years the two fights, climate and development, ran as if a win for one meant a loss for the other.
Mapped across much of the globe, this work suggests the two goals are often more aligned than previously thought. The cost of acting was never as steep as the rivalry claimed.
The study is published in Science.
Original article by Jordan Joseph