The high economic cost of biological invasions in China

China faces challenges to increasing biological invasions as its trade volume increases. However, comprehensive assessments of invasion costs in China are rare, which hinders its green growth for sustainable environments. We estimated economic costs of invasive alien species (IAS) in China using a comprehensive database based on new search phrases. China ranks as the second most economically vulnerable countries (following USA) to IAS. Cumulative costs of IAS reached US$ 3124.66 billion (US$ 2017) (or RMB 21,118.95 billion, with an average of RMB 422.38 billion per year) for total data from 1973 to 2022 and US$ 425.08 billion for robust data, 6.36 times and 3.32 times estimates from Global Invasion Cost Database (InvaCost), respectively. Forests and southeastern coastal regions suffered from higher costs. Damage cost was 184 times management cost for robust data and 73 times that for total data. IAS originating from North America posed greater costs to China than those from other continents. China needs to invest more resources in managing biological invasions.