Although they comprise less than 5% of the world population, Indigenous peoples protect 80% of the Earth’s biodiversity. How can we support farmers, reverse biodiversity loss, and restore our ecosystems?

Thomas Crowther is an ecologist studying the connections between biodiversity and climate change. He is a professor in the Department of Environmental Systems Science at ETH Zurich, chair of the advisory council for the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, and founder of Restor, an online platform for the global restoration movement. In 2021, the World Economic Forum named him a Young Global Leader for his work on the protection and restoration of biodiversity. Crowther’s post-doctoral research transformed the understanding of the world’s tree cover, and the study also inspired the World Economic Forum to announce its Trillion Trees initiative, which aims to conserve and restore one trillion trees globally within the decade.

THOMAS CROWTHER

Global restoration really means finding and empowering the millions of local communities, indigenous populations, and farmers who are promoting biodiversity. Restor is a digital platform, sort of like Google Maps, but for restoration. So rather than seeing coffee shops and supermarkets, you will see conservation projects and Indigenous-led restoration initiatives. And that means you can find a currently on Restor - I think we have around 140, 000 - so you can go on there for free right now and find thousands and thousands of these amazing heroes of nature. And you can zoom in and you can see every single tree on the ground. You can see every bush and you can fund them or you can buy their coffee or you can go visit their projects and do ecotourism. There's a myriad of ways that we can all support their efforts by also improving our own lives.

We need to be cutting our emissions so that we can allow nature to thrive and help us along the way. For far too long people have been squabbling about emissions. We should do this or we should do that. Climate change is way too big for us to be squabbling about things. We need to do everything now. When we grow the same crops every year, the soil gets more depleted and all the nutrients are lost. I've heard quotes that if we cannot find agricultural systems that rejuvenate the soil instead of depleting it, we are signing our death warrant. It's like we need to be promoting healthy soils if we're going to have any agriculture in the future.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET PODCAST

You entry point to ecology was through fungi. It's so fascinating to think about fungi and microbes and to reflect on our microbiome and how that influences us in so many ways. It like we’re just this envelope microbes that we carry around.

TOM CROWTHER

We're just a moving ecosystem and we've got this weird thing called consciousness that gives us this impression that we're somehow separate, but we are just part of the ecosystem. We're a bag of microbes that's interacting with all the microbes around us. And I think there's a real need for us to appreciate our harmony with nature and our interrelatedness with nature.

I had a very tangible interaction with a teacher that shaped everything in my life. I'm dyslexic, but I managed to get into a good university in the UK, and I was messing around in a class with 300 students, and the teacher sent me out of the class. But he met me after that class, and he essentially said, "What are you doing? Why are you here?" And I was like, "I like ecology, but I just can't keep up. There's too much reading. There's too much statistics." And he said, "If you like ecology, just find the bits that you like." And I just needed to look at the fungi and find them fascinating. And then that gives you positive endorphins when you have a successful experiment. So I just immersed myself in the parts that I enjoyed and through that process, things started to go really well and my degree went really well. And then after that, my career sort of exploded. And genuinely, I know if I had not encountered that professor, there's no way my career would have gone in the direction it has done. And I just think teachers are unbelievable inspirers, not necessarily for the knowledge they give you, but more for just inspiring you to follow your own your own path, your own trajectory.

The wealth of learning that can come from our collective awareness that essentially AI is a fancy-sounding way of saying computers can learn from the collective wisdom that exists throughout the Internet. And if we can empower the local stewards of biodiversity, local landowners, farmers indigenous populations with all of that wealth of information in a smart way, it can be incredibly empowering to many rural communities. AI might also open up an opportunity for us to rethink what life is about.