The Richest Room on Earth

A space deep beneath the ground, surrounded by metre-thick concrete walls. Airtight vault doors with electronic passwords protect access, with further heavy steel doors inside. Protective clothing is essential for access to the Richest Room on Earth.

The room is 50 square metres at minus 20c - a space that contains the seeds of 25,000 plant species. It’s humbling to share space with the richest biodiversity on the planet. Kew have a billion seeds in their care and have systems in place to protect them for a couple of thousand years. Maybe then, civilisation will know how to look after them in a restored natural environment.

Fellow Doer Giles Hutchings had invited me to spend the day at Wakehurst in Sussex, meeting the custodians of the Millennium Seed Bank, the impressive, knowledgeable and passionate botanists and scientists on a mission to collect and preserve for the future, seed samples from 25% of the plants on the planet. It’s a job of importance beyond words, with a ‘business as usual’ path that’s pointing towards the loss of half of life on earth by the end of the century. Careless.

Waking people to take action and reverse at least some biodiversity loss is going to take some doing. Doing like running Do Lectures next year at Kew Gardens, Eden and the Garden of Wales, and engaging hundreds of thousands, and a million or two more, on a journey of change a . Drop a line if you want to play and get involved. There’s a lot to Do.

Valuing nature for its own sake, and ours

At last, governments are starting to use a different language to value our environment, with a slow building of awareness that our environment can be valued using an Ecosystem Goods & Services approach. Although a relatively new way of measuring value, attributing tangible benefit to nature is going to be key if we are to prevent the destruction of our own as well as, in some cases, the majority of other species.

On 2 July, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) published an update on their threatened species survey, which makes stark reading. It's essential that our economic development takes biodiversity into account at a serious, strategic level, and that as citizens, we take action. Extracts from the report follow:

In Europe, 38% of all fishes are threatened and 28% in Eastern Africa. The high degree of connectivity in freshwater systems, allowing pollution or invasive species to spread rapidly, and the development of water resources with scant regard for the species that live in them, are behind the high level of threat.

“a broad range of marine species are experiencing potentially irreversible loss due to over-fishing, climate change, invasive species, coastal development and pollution.

“At least 17% of the 1,045 shark and ray species, 12.4% of groupers and six of the seven marine turtle species are threatened with extinction.

“27% of the 845 species of reef building corals are threatened, 20% are Near Threatened and there is not enough data for 17% to be assessed.

“Marine birds are much more threatened that terrestrial ones with 27.5% in danger of extinction, compared with 11.8% of terrestrial birds.

“The report shows nearly one third of amphibians, more than one in eight birds and nearly a quarter of mammals are threatened with extinction.

“For some plant groups, such as conifers and cycads, the situation is even more serious, with 28 percent and 52% threatened respectively. For all these groups, habitat destruction, through agriculture, logging and development, is the main threat and occurs worldwide.

Climate change is not currently the main threat to wildlife, but this may soon change... a significant proportion of species that are currently not threatened with extinction are susceptible to climate change, including 30% of non-threatened birds, 51% of non-threatened corals and 41% of non-threatened amphibians.