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NATURE


UK government statistics indicate that 83% of the UK population live in urban areas with 36% living in large conurbations. It is therefore not surprising that a 2017 survey sponsored by Kerrigold, the butter company, found that “22% of the nation [that is almost 15m people] said that they haven’t been to the countryside more than once in the last 10 years. 11% had never heard a cow moo and 1 in 10 admitted that they had never heard a cock crow, except on TV”.


This is particularly important when we discover that 18.6 million hectares of trees, shrubs, plants and fungi were destroyed in the Australian bushfires in 2019/20. That is an area the same as all of the agricultural land in the whole of the UK plus an extra block just a bit bigger than Yorkshire.


Plants are not just food or to enhance our homes and gardens, many plant extracts are the basis for medicines and plant based ecosystems regulate climate, prevent floods and filter water. Yet in the five years from 2010 to 2015, 32 million hectares of primary or recovering forest were destroyed. Amnesty International has reported that ‘deforestation in Brazil increased 34.5 per cent between August 2019 and July 2020 compared to the same period over 2018 and 2019, destroying a further 920,500 hectares’.


The Global Assessment Report says that ‘Seventy-five per cent of the world ‘s land surface is significantly altered, 66 per cent of the ocean area is experiencing increasing cumulative impacts, and over 85 per cent of wetlands has been lost’.

The Kew Gardens Plan Survey 2020 summaries the situation as ‘Never before has the biosphere, the thin layer of life we call home, been under such intensive and urgent threat. Deforestation rates have soared as we have cleared land to feed ever-more people, global emissions are disrupting the climate system, new pathogens threaten our crops and our health, illegal trade has eradicated entire plant populations, and non-native species are outcompeting local floras.


Sources - The Guardian, newspaper, UN Report on Australian Bushfires, Kew Gardens Plant Survey 2020. the Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, Amnesty International.and news.mongabay.com.


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