Work

Biodiversity conservation and its associations with economic performance, inequality, and peace

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Biodiversity conservation is increasingly recognized as a product of coupled social–ecological systems shaped not only by ecological processes, but also by economic capacity, social inequality, and geopolitical stability. Here, we examined whether national conservation performance is systematically associated with economic prosperity, income inequality, peace, and the importance of natural resources in the national economy across 142 countries. Conservation performance was represented using the Nature Conservation Index (NCI), a composite metric integrating biodiversity threats, land management, governance capacity, and future environmental trends. We analysed relationships between NCI, Gross National Income per capita, the Gini coefficient, the National Peace Index, and the total nature resources rents using a generalized additive model that accounted for nonlinear relationships and income stratification. Together, these societal variables explained deviance of 52.2% for the NCI model. Economic prosperity was positively associated with NCI, although the relationship was nonlinear across income groups, suggesting that conservation capacity does not increase uniformly with development. Counter to commonly assumed relationships between inequality and biodiversity loss, income inequality showed a positive multivariate association with NCI scores. This result suggests that high national conservation performance can coexist with unequal social conditions, potentially reflecting centralized or exclusionary conservation systems that elevate institutional conservation metrics without necessarily improving equitable biodiversity outcomes. We also found that more peaceful countries consistently exhibited higher conservation performance, supporting the view that geopolitical stability provides enabling conditions for sustained conservation governance and institutional continuity. We further suggest that national conservation indices may partly capture governance capacity, reporting infrastructure, and political commitment rather than ecological condition alone, while telecoupled trade systems may allow wealthier nations to externalize environmental pressures beyond their borders. Although the cross-sectional design precludes causal inference, our findings highlight the need to interpret global conservation indicators cautiously and to incorporate social equity and externalized environmental impacts more explicitly into international biodiversity assessment frameworks.

Source: Environmental Research Letters

DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/aeb27a

Authors: Jonathan Peereman, Daniel Eli Orenstein, Guan-Xun Chen, Teng-Chiu Lin

Institutions: University of Liège, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, National Taiwan Normal University

Language: English

Topic: Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management

Subfield: Global and Planetary Change

Field: Environmental Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDGs: Life on land, Reduced inequalities, Peace, justice, and strong institutions

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $3,045