Giving Compass' Take:

• The World Economic Forum explores how green investment could create many jobs in the midst of COVID-19 recovery. 

• How can philanthropy play a role in green investment? 

• Read about renewable energy in the age of COVID-19. 

In recent decades, Costa Rica has doubled its forest cover while tripling the size of its economy - an example of how better protecting nature can create jobs rather than curb them, the Central American country’s environment minister said Wednesday.

“Restoring nature is not a burden to economic development,” said Carlos Manuel Rodriguez during an online event organised by the World Economic Forum (WEF), famed for its high-powered annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

If similar shifts - from adopting smarter farming to slashing fossil fuel subsidies and rethinking urban land use - happened globally, they could create 395 million jobs and $10 trillion in new business opportunities by 2030, WEF officials said.

But creating the changes would cost some $2.7 trillion in investment - about equal to US stimulus spending announced in March to combat the impact of the new coronavirus, according to a new WEF report on the economic benefits of protecting nature.

“It seems huge but … Covid has shown us that, as humanity, we are capable of making drastic changes,” said Akanksha Khatri, author of the report and a WEF nature and biodiversity expert.

Harnessing stimulus spending now to ensure that recoveries around the world are green and protect nature, biodiversity and the climate would have a long-term payoff and cut future costs and risks, she and others said.

Changes include rethinking agriculture to ensure it protects rather than strips soils, with farmers potentially earning an income from storing climate-heating carbon in their soils and protecting forests as well as selling food, panelists said.

In some countries, shifts are already starting, with Pakistan and Kenya, for instance, harnessing stimulus funds to drive tree-planting campaigns, said Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN Environment Programme.

Read the full article about green investment around the globe from Thomson Reuters Foundation at Eco-Business.