Who pays for a protected Earth? Unequal economic exposure in the race to GBF Target 3

Reconciling biodiversity conservation with food production is one of the central land-use challenges of the coming decade. Yet the economic consequences of implementing the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework’s Target 3, which aims to conserve 30% of terrestrial and marine areas by 2030, remain poorly understood, especially in terms of how transition risks would be distributed across countries and along agri-food value chains. This paper addresses that gap by estimating the direct and indirect economic exposure associated with area-based conservation scenarios. We combine four spatially explicit protected-area expansion scenarios from Shen et al. (2023), gridded crop and livestock datasets, and a multi-regional input–output model (GLORIA) to trace both direct agricultural exposure and upstream intersectoral effects. In doing so, we build new country-product and sector-level exposure datasets tailored to macroeconomic analysis, and suitable for future assessments of balance-of-payments constraints, food inflation, and dietary change. We find that direct exposure is concentrated in upper-middle-income, biodiversity-rich, export-oriented economies, whereas high-income countries are relatively more exposed to indirect effects through trade and value-chain linkages. Low-income countries face the largest relative burden. Across scenarios, average country-level exposed output reaches around 7% of GDP, and between one quarter and one third of global calorie supply lies in areas targeted for protection. These results show that achieving 30 × 30 is not only an ecological challenge, but also a major land-use and development issue. They point to the need for compensation mechanisms, international coordination, and food-system transitions capable of reconciling conservation with environmental justice.