There is a secret weapon at our disposal when combating the climate and biodiversity crises: plant science. Last weekend I spoke about it at the Hay Festival Cartagena de Indias in Colombia. As I looked out at my audience, I wondered what this word, biodiversity, — which was such a buzzword at this year’s Davos forum — means to them. Is it nature? Or wildlife? Just as our emotional connections to the natural world are unique, our understanding of biodiversity is too.
Everyone in the room had one thing in common — we were all biologists. The origin of the word “biologist” is “life-learner”. If you are gazing at life from a window, swimming in water, hiking up a mountain, or experiencing nature via the dulcet tones of Sir David Attenborough, you are a biologist too.
Keeping our interest alive is the key to both a world where humankind and nature can co-exist in harmony, and to motivating ourselves to shape the future we want. This is, of course, big talk. We aggressively harness the natural world in order to maintain our conveniences, feed our families, and save lives, as that is what we know.
If our planet’s history is charted on a 24-hour clock, modern humans arrived at a late hour, like tipsy stragglers at a party. Yet we have transformed the world in a way that is so radical it’s impossible to grasp. And the blame game is pointless — early humans in the Amazon hunted large mammals and cleared the landscape for thousands of years before Europeans’ arrival. Then, as now, it was environmental degradation rather than climate change that was potentially the biggest threat to biological diversity.
In Colombia, for instance, 66 per cent of deforestation is concentrated in the Amazon. It is being converted to cattle farming, mining, road construction, and plantations of soybeans and oil palms. We are moments away from losing a language — nature’s mother tongue — which may speak of life-saving secrets. Is the cure for coronavirus burning in the Amazon’s rainforests?
What is to be done? At the latest global meeting on climate change, governments failed to agree on more ambitious reductions of carbon emissions. Scientists at Kew are using satellite and drone images to see how fast environmental change is taking place and where, and what can be done. This includes looking again at what plants and fungi can do for us — which is a lot.
As stewards of this planet, we must ensure that 2020 is remembered as the turning point in the conversation, with October’s UN Biodiversity Conference making final decisions about the global biodiversity framework. If we continue as if it’s business as usual, our grandchildren may roll their eyes at our quaint stories of walks in forests teeming with life. They will cease to be biologists, and we will be lost.
Professor Alexandre Antonelli is Director of Science at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
