Efforts to rewild landscapes across Europe and North America could be making global biodiversity loss worse by shifting environmental destruction to poorer, more biodiverse regions, a new study warns.

Scientists from the University of Cambridge, U.K., found that when farming and resource extraction move abroad to accommodate conservation in wealthy countries, it can result in agricultural expansion in areas more crucial for nature, inadvertently resulting in more overall ecological damage.

“Areas of much greater importance for nature are likely to pay the price for conservation efforts in wealthy nations unless we work to fix this leak,” lead author Andrew Balmford, a conservation scientist at Cambridge, said in a written statement.

“At its worst, we could see some conservation actions cause net global harm,” Balmford added.

The researchers found where conservation happens makes a big difference. For example, rewilding U.K. farmland could result in five times more ecological harm, globally, by shifting food production to more fragile ecosystems. But reforesting a soy farm in Brazil could have five times the ecological benefits if that farming then moves to less biodiverse regions like the U.S. or Argentina.

This phenomenon has been observed before. When the U.S. protected old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest, timber production increased elsewhere in North America, shifting the environmental burden rather than reducing it. Now, scientists say, large-scale conservation efforts in Europe and China could be fueling deforestation in the Global South as both regions import more of what they no longer produce.

While the EU’s antideforestation law may help, loopholes weaken its impact, Balmford told Mongabay by email. Producers can bypass it by rerouting deforested land’s output to non-EU markets while sending older farm products to the EU, among other tactics. “A stronger approach is to seek to increase EU self-sufficiency and so reduce imports,” Balmford wrote.

Conservation interventions are vulnerable to this kind of leak because most threats to biodiversity come from farming, fishing, hunting or logging.

Alf Hornborg, a professor of human ecology at Lund University in Sweden, who wasn’t involved in the study, said the issue goes beyond conservation: it’s a symptom of unequal global trade.

“The EU is no longer using as much farmland because it’s more profitable to import agricultural produce from the Global South. So, we can afford to use it, for example, to restore wetlands,” Hornborg told Mongabay by phone.

He noted that he personally receives subsidies from the EU to turn former farmland into wetlands in Sweden. Wealthy nations gain greener landscapes, he said, as environmental costs shift to poorer countries, where deforestation and biodiversity loss accelerate to meet export demands.

“We look at all kinds of inequalities when it comes to wages and land rents. But even the question of biodiversity has this inequality dimension,” Hornborg said. “I’m glad people are looking at this.”

Banner image: Before and after images of a U.S. wetland restoration project. Image courtesy of Ryan Crehan/USFWS.