EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Subsidies against Nature: A multidimensional framework for biodiversity-aligned national budgets

Morgane Gonon, Améline Vallet, Vincent Deschamps, Amélie Le Mieux, Aurélien Oosterlinck, Hélène Soubelet, Louise Dupuis and Harold Levrel

Ecological Economics, 2025, vol. 235, issue C

Abstract: Governments provide more than USD 800 billion annually in environmentally harmful subsidies at the global level despite international commitments. This paper introduces a novel and replicable framework for identifying biodiversity-harmful subsidies within national budgets. Our multidimensional approach is based on the five drivers of biodiversity loss: land use change, resource exploitation, climate change, pollution, and invasive species. Our framework evaluates subsidies across seven economic sectors — transport, housing, industry, agriculture, livestock, power generation, and digital deployment— based on their expected biodiversity impact (harmful, positive, mixed, neutral, or unclassifiable). We apply this framework to the French national budget and find that, in 2022, €27.14 billion were allocated to subsidize harmful activities. Pollution is the most financially supported driver of biodiversity loss. Our analysis also reveals significant trade-offs, with 25% of climate-positive subsidies exacerbating land use pressures. The study calls for a sector-specific approach to subsidy reform. By codeveloping this framework with biodiversity experts and public authorities, we provide a decision-support tool to align public investments with pathways towards sustainability.

Keywords: Biodiversity; Green budgeting; Harmful subsidies; Sustainable pathways; Biodiversity financing; Public finance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800925001442
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:235:y:2025:i:c:s0921800925001442

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2025.108661

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-05-20
Handle: RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:235:y:2025:i:c:s0921800925001442