FAO: Ecosystem Degradation Costs Up to $6.3 Trillion a Year

The FAO's framing is notable for putting restoration in cost-effectiveness terms rather than conservation ones, which is the language that tends to move agricultural and development budgets. The wide $878 billion to $6.3 trillion range — a sevenfold spread — signals how contested the underlying valuation methods remain, and that gap is itself the story for anyone tracking how natural-capital accounting gets used in policy and, increasingly, in RWA-style ecosystem markets. Whether the FAO's cost-effectiveness claim gets picked up by finance ministries and land-use planners, or stays within the environmental ministries that commissioned it, is the open question.