Plant extinction is major threat to healthcare and biodiversity
The Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, London, has published its fifth report on flora, biodiversity, habitat and climate change.
200 scientists from 102 institutions in 30 countries have contributed to the work, which is the largest single assessment of plant and fungi health ever conducted. Among the key takeaways are the prospect that nearly half of all flowering plants are now at risk of extinction, largely as a result of habitat destruction. This accounts for more than 100,000 individual species.
Of the nearly-19,000 types discovered and identified since 2020, including fungi, 77% are already endangered. Remarkably, looking at fungi alone, at the current rate it would take scientists between 750 and 1,000 years to name each of those new species, emphasising the very real risk of losing varieties before they can be labelled. It is also now understood that fungi is the second largest kingdom of eukaryotes (organisms made up of cells with a membrane-bound nucleus) on the planet, after animals, with 2.5million separate species.
When any species becomes extinct it impacts the wider ecosystem to which it belongs. However, experts have also voiced concern over the effect on healthcare in years to come, and the increasing threat that species we already rely on for the production of vital medicines could soon disappear for good. Researchers are now calling on all new species of plants and fungi to be treated as ‘under threat’ unless it can be proven otherwise.
‘When we consider that nine out of ten of our medicines come from our plants, what we are potentially staring down the barrel at is losing half of all of our future medicines,’ said Dr Matilda Brown, a conservation specialist at Kew. ‘Every species we lose is a species that we don’t know what opportunities we’re losing … It could be a cancer fighting drug, it could be the solution to hunger … And so to lose that, before we get a chance to study it, would be a tragedy.’
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