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Thomas: Now, Mark and Kevin have softened you up, and you're weak at the end of the day—we're gonna finish it off with the proposal, OK?
So, it's a question, the answer to which we all want to know. I think every single presentation we've had today has asked a variant of this question, right?
I know what you're thinking—it's not CarbonTech's latest innovation to solve the problem. But if we did have the crystal ball and we dusted it off… what would it say?
What would it say is coming for our urban spaces—politically, socially, economically, critically, environmentally?
We don’t have a crystal ball, but we do have a fair amount of warning signs, don’t we? And the alarms are all flashing.
This was the front page of Nature last week—the biggest biological journal in the world. The 1.5°C limit—that was the "do not breach" limit. And we breached it last year, globally. Even though we had a really wet, cold year last year, globally, we still reached 1.5°C.
Now, I had a talk with Tim earlier and said, "Tim, I'm not throwing shade." Like, we lost an awful lot of trees as well—no doubt due to the 2022 drought. But do you have any idea what half a million trees looks like? Do you know how many trucks that takes to put in? And then how many trucks it would take to take them back out again?
We're still losing trees from the 2022 drought. No doubt there are other factors at play here, but Kevin and I spent a good part of that year walking around the arboretum, looking at the latest big tree that had just exploded.
This is going to happen more often. This isn't going to get easier. This is going to get harder.
As The Daily Mail asked in August last year: "Is Kew Gardens heading for Treemageddon?"
In hindsight, we wished we had called our report Treemageddon—more "woke nonsense," or something like that.
Kevin mentioned it in his talk. One of the early screenings we did—though we’ve gotten more sophisticated now—suggested that maybe half of our trees might be at risk by the end of the century.
Now, that doesn’t mean they’re going to die. That nuance was lost in the Commons when we presented it. But it does mean we’re in the twilight zone—we don’t know what’s going to happen.
As horticulturists, as gardeners, as arborists, we know that plants don’t like to grow in suboptimal conditions.
I'm just going to leave this quote up there for a couple of minutes. I do a lot of these kinds of presentations, and this quote is a useful one—it summarizes the issue.
Dave is a researcher in Melbourne with a long history of working in botanic gardens and urban green spaces.
Some of you might be Australian, some of you might know—Aussies were sharpened towards this issue because of the Millennium Drought, which was Australia’s worst drought in recorded history. It lasted from the early ’90s through to 2010.
So, adaptation, resilience—they kind of got the jump on it. They produced the world’s first landscape succession plan for a botanic garden in 2016.
Which is what we—I don’t want to say copied—but took inspiration from.
So, who are we, and what’s the landscape succession plan?
That’s us. Well, that’s one of our sites—our site in West London. Very simply, we are an approaching-300-year-old botanical institution. We've got sites in West London, but also in Sussex and a permanent research station in Madagascar.
There are 17,000 species in total—taking account of the glasshouses and nurseries as well. 17,000 species on this site alone, which is the Guinness World Record for the most diverse single-site botanic garden in the world. That’s 5% of known plant species—which you can see on a visit to Kew Gardens.
That’s staggering—it’s my favorite stat.
Kevin mentioned 11,000 trees, about 1,500 species—which is about the same as the total number of native species in the UK.
We’ve got that many trees and shrubs here. You can’t just click your fingers and create this tomorrow. This is centuries' worth of work putting this together.
I looked at the London Assembly Tree Report last week. I think they said 90% of London’s trees are made up of just 25 species. Meanwhile, we have 1,500 species here.
So, we can learn a lot from that.
What is the Landscape Succession Plan?
As you can see, our landscape owes a lot. The joke is that we’re just a field with 11,000 trees in it.
That’s the front cover of our plan. And very simply, we asked:
What is the likelihood of our landscape—our design features—surviving?
For example, this is a 120-year-old avenue of London Plane and Holm Oak trees.
What’s the likelihood it ends up like this by the end of the century?
This image is not real—the grass is real (from 2022), but my talented colleague, Jeff, photoshopped all the leaves off the trees.
But if we do nothing… is that a real risk?
We wanted to find out.
So, this was the first pass that we did—the work Kevin mentioned. I won’t go into it in detail, but:
Green = Good
Orange = Not so good
Red = Bad
Anything in green means it has similar conditions in the wild.
Now, this is a map for now—our trees today. Right now, about 80% have similar conditions to those in the wild.
If we fast-forward to the end of the century… this is where The Daily Mail got their headline.
Up to 50% of our trees might be experiencing temperatures they haven’t evolved to deal with.
So… what does that mean? What can we do about it?
Why Should You Care?
We know an awful lot about the 1,500 species that exist within our walls.
But outside? We’re just a fraction of Richmond. We’re not even the biggest green space in Richmond—that’s Richmond Park.
We can’t make a big difference inside our walls.
But this is where you come in.
One of our big goals is to expand our reach—to strengthen our weak links and make links where we have none.
A Call to Action
The Tree Management Research Group—what we hope to take forward from today—would help us:
Deliver science-based knowledge and solutions
Extend our reach
Strengthen weak links and create new connections
Influence national policy
This is literally one of our corporate priorities.
So… what about for you?
Our Landscape Succession Plan was written by a glorified gardener (me) and a jumped-up tree surgeon (Kevin).
It cost us no money.
It used data we already had.
Yet it reached 1.7 billion people—which is a meaningless number but was still our biggest story last year.
People care. They want good news stories.
Imagine if we scaled that up. No one has done this screening at a local authority level.
We need positive stories. We need collaboration.
And as far as that grant is concerned—we can’t do it individually. But together, we can.
There will be a QR code at the end—please scan it, visit the Tree Management Research Group website, and sign up.
We’d love to hear from you.
Thank you.
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