A new era of mycelial conservation could begin this month when the UK and Chile propose that fungi should be placed alongside animals and plants as a separate realm for environmental protection.
Mushrooms, mould, mildew, yeast and lichen would all receive elevated status under the plan, which will be submitted to the UN convention on biological diversity (CBD) during the Cop16 meeting in Cali, Colombia, which opens on 21 October.
The two governments will co-sponsor a “pledge for fungal conservation”, which has been exclusively shared with the Guardian, arguing for the “recognition of fungi as an independent kingdom of life in legislation, policies and agreements, in order to advance their conservation and to adopt concrete measures that allow for maintaining their benefits to ecosystems and people in the context of the triple environmental crisis.”
This refers to a growing body of evidence that fungi play a crucial role in remediating soil, sequestering a third of carbon from fossil fuel emissions, and breaking down plastics and polluting chemicals. Mycologists say that without fungi, most plants are unable to live outside water and therefore life on Earth as we know it would not exist.
“This is the most important thing that has ever happened in the field of fungal conservation,” said Giuliana Furci, the Chilean-British chief executive of the Fungi Foundation, which has been the driving force in the 3F Initiative, which aims to have “funga” recognised alongside flora and fauna. Unlike those terms, the word funga is not Latin and has been coined because it is morphologically similar.
“If this pledge is adopted by the CBD, it will introduce a new opportunity for decision-making, a new way of seeing,” said Furci. “Looking at nature without fungi is like trying to diagnose a disease without doing a blood test. Fungi are the firmament of life on Earth. They make systems ecosystems.”
The pledge says that humans have depended on fungi for thousands of years for the production, flavouring, and preservation of food and medicine, noting it is essential for bread, soya products, cheese, wine and beer, among many other uses. It calls on the secretariat of the convention on biological diversity to develop an agenda for the global conservation of macroscopic and microscopic fungi for ecological and human wellbeing.
Another of the 3F campaigners, Merlin Sheldrake, a biologist and the author of the book Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures, urged other countries to take advantage of what he called a historic opportunity.
“Fungi are largely invisible ecosystem engineers that underwrite the regenerative capacity of the living world,” he said. “Despite their many key roles in regulating the climate and sustaining global biodiversity, fungi have been overlooked in most governmental and legislative frameworks. It is vital that we make progress on this challenge, both to combat the destruction of fungal communities, which accelerates both climate change and biodiversity loss, and to make it easier to work with fungi to help respond to the many pressing crises we face.”
Chile has been a frontrunner in fungal recognition and conservation. National laws oblige companies and government bodies to include fungi in environmental impact assessments for projects. If risks are found, they must be listed and mitigated.
Chile’s environment minister, Maisa Rojas, said fungi were a unifying element that brought together the issues of climate, nature and pollution. “They help with all three,” she said. “The recognition of fungi helps a lot to understand how life works holistically. We hope the CBD can adopt this and advise countries to include fungi in national laws and strategies.”
The issue also overlaps with the growing campaign to strengthen the legal rights of nature, according to César Rodríguez-Garavito, a Colombian legal scholar who heads the Earth Rights Research & Action Clinic at New York University. His organisation joined the 3F initiative three years ago to try to close what he saw as a gap in international and domestic law. “Underinclusion is a matter of justice,” he said. “Fungi need to be included in the CBD’s legal framework of biodiversity. We feel there is a sense of common purpose on this issue, which is huge but not divisive.”
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The initiative is backed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew. The latter’s director of science, Alexandre Antonelli, said the pledge was well evidenced and well warranted: “Fungal conservation has not received any attention from the public, so there are no funds for it anywhere. Just 0.4% of fungal species have been assessed for vulnerability, yet the role of fungi is vital in food security, medicine, ecosystem maintenance and so many other ways. The science is clear, but it is a question of social recognition. We need to bring fungi into the discussion.”
Kew is home to the world’s biggest fungarium, a collection of 1.25m pressed, dried specimens from around the world that is now undergoing DNA sequencing to assess toxic risks and medical benefits. This analysis has confirmed that fungi are an independent realm, though closer to animals than plants.
Antonelli said this only scratched the surface, because scientists have described less than 10% of the fungal species that are thought to exist in the world. “Funga is the next frontier of diversity science,” he said. “They produce so many different molecules. They are an absolutely amazing but largely under-studied system.”
The solution to future pandemics may be found in this form of life. Antonelli said that humanity ignored the green mould on bread for thousands of years until Alexander Fleming realised this genus of fungus, Penicillium, could be used as an antibiotic, since when it has saved countless millions of lives. Filamentous fungi are the basis for statins, which lower cholesterol. The benefits of another group of fungi, yeast, have been known for much longer.
“When you drink your glass of beer on Friday, remember you have fungi to thank for that,” Antonelli said.