Fungi could be given same status as flora and fauna under conservation plan
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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."

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.



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