“The Red List”: Biodiversity loss and food

Advolly Richmond is exploring how food production methods and climate change today are exacerbating issues of biodiversity loss. As conditions change and human activity intervenes with environments, entire ecosystems are thrown out of balance, and the consequences for species are dire.

We could be losing plants and species science hasn’t even named, all due to harmful agricultural practises and accelerating climate change.

But Kew scientists and partners around the world are working to conserve species before it’s too late, by seeking out their wild relatives that have properties that can withstand the conditions of the future.

We travel from the mountains of Sierra Leone to track down a rare but resilient wild coffee variety, to deep underground in rural Sussex, where Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank is conserving the world’s seeds for future science at Wakehurst. Dr Elinor Breman gives us a tour of this biodiverse bunker, and her colleague Dr Aisyah Faruk explains her work tracking down wild relatives of fruit and nut species in Georgia and Armenia.

But it’s not just about finding alternative crops, as food journalist Dan Saladino explains: crop monocultures are leaving foods and ecosystems vulnerable to pests and disease.

Meanwhile Dr Caspar Chater is in Edible Science: Kew’s Kitchen Garden, ready to explain how a more diverse approach to what we eat can help save the world, and Professor Phil Stevenson tells us about his work with pollinators, the critical species that make so much of food production possible.

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