Climate Change

Climate change and biodiversity are the global issues of our time. Our climate change research spans a breadth of issues including its effects on, adaptations of and mitigations by plants and the people who manage and depend upon them. We inform and collaborate with the scientific community, the public, conservationists, sustainable development workers and policy makers. We address climate change around the world: in Latin America, in Africa, in Asia, in Oceania and in the United States including our home state of Missouri. We will not address the fundamental evidence for climate change well documented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Plants are affected by climate change in many ways, and many of the solutions depend on plants. Most basically, the climate change research of the Missouri Botanical Garden monitors the effects of and details solutions for climate change.

These are the various research efforts by topic and link to projects within the Missouri Botanical Garden and amongst our collaborators:

Adaptation, mitigation and carbon sequestration

Adaptation, mitigation and carbon sequestration strategies for climate change being developed at the Missouri Botanical Garden dovetail with the Garden’s enduring leadership in conservation of biodiversity. Plants are the one sure carbon negative resource of our planet: plants take up carbon dioxide and emit oxygen. Plants are the solution to conversion of the excess carbon dioxide that causes global warming. The Missouri Botanical Garden is in a unique position to lead the global effort to mitigate climate change through plants and to sequester carbon in plants.

Plant conservation and conservation of natural vegetation assure that the carbon sequestered by plants remains in those plants or in the soil organic matter rather than emitted into the atmosphere, which is what happens with deforestation.  Tropical rainforests and other biomes store immense quantities of carbon; these biomes are being conserved as part of the mandate of the Missouri Botanical Garden.

With climate change, however, often plants are no longer adapted to the areas they now inhabit (see Plant Distributions and Migration above). They must move with their habitats or go extinct. Several projects at the Missouri Botanical Garden are monitoring these plant responses and enabling plant migrations through conservation of corridors of natural vegetation (Midwest, Madagascar). Native plant gardens (Midwest, Costa Rica) also can conserve plants and help extend their ranges.

People too must adapt to climate change and plants are one of our primary tools for adaptation. Worldwide plants are the kingpin of human livelihoods. With climate change, agriculture and health are adversely affected (Himalayas). People must adapt through uses of plant resources often unfamiliar to them. The Missouri Botanical Garden is in a unique position to provide vast amounts of information on plant resources and to offer leadership in helping people adapt to climate change.
Additional Climate Change Links