Original paper
Escalating economic costs of invasive species in China driven by hidden impacts and policy gaps
Wang, Peilin; Xue, Yantao; Jiang, Hongbo; Liu, Chunlong; Zhang, Chi; Huang, Hongkun; Zhang, Guifen; Wan, Fanghao; Zhang, Yibo; Courchamp, Franck
Entomologia Generalis Volume 45 Number 3 (2025), p. 667 - 678
published: Aug 19, 2025
published online: Jul 2, 2025
manuscript accepted: Apr 30, 2025
final revised version received: Apr 18, 2025
manuscript revision requested: Feb 2, 2025
manuscript received: Nov 20, 2024
Open Access (paper may be downloaded free of charge)
Abstract
Invasive alien species (IAS) lead to substantial economic impacts globally. Accurate estimation of these costs is critical for developing policies to manage IAS effectively, as economic costs reflect the scale of invasion consequences. Despite the expected close linkage between economic costs and management policies of IAS, their interplay remains underexplored. China ranks among the countries most severely impacted by IAS and has implemented numerous management initiatives. Here, we focus on 11 major agriculture and forestry IAS in China to (i) comprehensively estimate their total economic costs and (ii) explore the relationship between these costs and policy development since the 1980s. By scanning 9710 relevant references, we identified 431 cost data, with 87% were new (hidden costs), so missed by the InvaCost database, likely due to their being in the Chinese ‘pest’-focused literature. The total economic cost of these 11 IAS amounted to US$ 236.35 billion, with US$ 223.25 billion attributable to hidden cost, revealing severe underestimation of current cost assessments. Economic costs exhibited a strong positive correlation with the number of national IAS management policies, indicating synchronized growth between economic costs and regulatory interventions. Our findings underscore the need to address terminology and language biases in databases like InvaCost to achieve comprehensive IAS cost assessments and guide efficient policy formulation.
Keywords
agriculture • forestry • Policy development • InvaCost • pest • invasive alien species