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Kew’s Royal Botanical Gardens has released a plan on how to deal with rapid global warming and climate change, responding to fears that it could suffer from extreme tree loss.
In the past few years, temperatures in the UK have reached record-breaking highs, with 2022 being the country’s hottest year on record and 2023 not lagging far behind. For Kew, droughts in 2022 caused major concern, causing 400 trees to die in the year – a mammoth increase in tree deaths compared to the annual average of 30.
Kew’s plan, titled ‘Planting for the Future’, maps how the garden intends to plant trees according to projected climate change and affects. These predictions are based on climate mapping, using rising temperatures, sea levels, novel plant pests and diseases and changing rainfall to model changing climates. These figures also show Kew losing over 50 percent of its species, with additional modelling suggesting a lesser 30 percent.
The models show common British trees, such as the silver birch and common oak, are most at-risk. They also show which trees from around the world are already adapted to where Britain’s climate will be – predicted in 2050 to resemble the climate of Barcelona in 2019.
However, current Kew species like the common oak are already found in different environments, stretched across Europe to West Russia and Kazakhstan. By planting these variants, Kew intends to continue to support native species and help with biodiversity, an important tool in preventing disease from uprooting an entire species in one location.
Director of Kew Gardens Richard Barley said: ‘This is not just about Kew Gardens, it is a broad call to diversify the plants we select for our landscapes.’
Fans of Kew will be pleased to know that the ‘Old Lions’, five of Kew’s oldest trees, will survive in all the predictions.
The changing plant life at Kew isn’t only reflective of what happens in the gardens, but serves as a microcosm for Britain's changing landscape. As the report shows, as the climate gets warmer, the need for more biodiversity and adaptation is ever-growing.
Did you see that Kew Gardens is massively expanding its £1 entry concession tickets scheme?
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