Given Half a Chance by Edward Davey

Author:Edward Davey [Davey, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783526598
Publisher: Unbound
Published: 2018-12-02T16:00:00+00:00

Alexander von Humboldt was one of the great explorers of the nineteenth century and an early witness to the biodiversity of the Andes and the Amazon. Humboldt explored the landscapes of South America with astonishing curiosity, describing hundreds of species with great care and eye for detail. Around the world, today, scientists follow in his footsteps to document and understand the natural world. One of Humboldt’s modern-day successors is Professor Kathy Willis, outgoing Director of Science at Kew, who leads a team of 380 scientists in Kew’s herbarium and fungarium, as well as its Millennium Seed Bank. Between them, they curate and research some 8.5 million specimens. Kathy and I met one spring day in Kew to discuss her work. She began by praising this ‘extraordinary national asset in West London’, describing the history of its collections since 1759 and over 150 ongoing projects with 400 partners.

Their purpose is a simple one: ‘to understand the diversity and distribution of plants on Earth’. Over the past 20 years, Kathy’s thinking on biodiversity has evolved. Originally, she explained, she considered biodiversity first and foremost as ‘a precious resource, the evolutionary engine house of the world’. The sheer diversity and distribution of plants is ‘as important as any other aspect of life on Earth’. Her arguments for biodiversity protection were then based around the intrinsic value Michael McCarthy referenced earlier: ‘nature for nature’s sake’.

More recently, Kathy has felt that these arguments haven’t worked: rates of extinction and land-use change remain ‘terrifying’. And so she has been forced to consider again ‘how the world really works’. She was particularly struck by a journey to Madagascar, where in villages she visited: ‘poverty overrides concern for a beautiful tree, if you need the charcoal to feed your children.’ And so, Kathy felt, the challenge was to quantify and understand the value of the tree for ‘the services to humans it provides’, and thereby to show how biodiversity is essential to human life and well-being. If this value could be demonstrated, and an economic system established in which the community would stand to benefit from keeping those trees standing, then biodiversity would be better protected.

Around the world, Kew is seeking to help people find solutions to pressing environmental problems. For example, where biodiversity is being lost due to agricultural expansion, Kew seeks to find and draw attention to alternative crops with high yields and high protein content which could be used as a substitute for the world’s main crops (themselves at significant risk due to their limited gene pool). Ensete ventricosum – from the banana family – is one such example. It provides food to 20 million Ethiopians. The plant reproduces vegetatively and flowers in the wild. ‘The world needs this genetic diversity and resilience,’ Kathy argues, before describing Kew’s work to protect and document different subspecies of the Ensete plant.

In another example, Kew has helped Ethiopia to draw on its herbarium records to establish the right climate for coffee, assess the areas it currently grows in and determine the risks posed to coffee by climate change.

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