[Taxacom] world (plant) species checklist in the news

Sat Sep 9 06:13:58 CDT 2006

FYI

In today's Independent, there is a summary of an interview with Peter Crane,
the outgoing chief of Kew Botanical Gardens. Though it is mostly about
biofuel and its perils, it lists specifically Peter's impact to create a
checklist of the world's plants as one of his big achievements.

Donat Agosti

Independent

World must wake up to the dangers of biofuels, head of Kew Gardens warns 

By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor 

Published: 09 September 2006 

The world should wake up to the dangers of the mass production of biofuels,
which are increasingly seen as a major solution to global warming, according
to Professor Sir Peter Crane, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. 

Extensive production of biofuel crops, such as oil palms, could destroy
remaining areas of rainforest and bring about a new cycle of worldwide
intensive agriculture involving vast applications of artificial fertilisers
and pesticides, and requiring enormous water resources, said Professor
Crane, who as the head of Kew Gardens is the world's leading plant
scientist.

"There are big opportunities with biofuels, but there are big problems too,"
he said. "It's not a free lunch."

Professor Crane, 52, is retiring from Kew after seven very successful years
to take up a chair at the University of Chicago, and gave his biofuels
warning as part of a valedictory interview with The Independent.

It comes at a critical moment. The production of road transport fuels made
from crops, which do not add to the greenhouse gases causing global warming,
is now starting to take off around the globe, and is likely to grow vastly.
It will be one of the main agricultural developments of the 21st century.

The attraction of biofuels in the fight against climate change is that they
are "carbon neutral". Unlike the fossil fuels, oil, gas and coal, which when
burnt add to the net amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the CO2
which biofuels produce when ignited has been absorbed from the atmosphere by
the crops used to make them, and so the net atmospheric amount is not
increased.

The best known biofuels are ethanol, a petrol substitute made from sugar
cane, sugar beet or maize, widely used in Brazil and coming into use in many
other countries, and biodiesel, which is made from oil palms, oilseed rape
or recycled vegetable oil.

American output of ethanol from maize is now rising at 30 per cent a year;
Germany is raising output of biodiesel by nearly 50 per cent a year and
China has built the world's biggest ethanol plant. Britain jumped on to the
biofuels bandwagon this year with an obligation on British petrol companies
to blend a fixed proportion of biofuels with all the petrol and diesel that
they sell on garage forecourts. But Sir Peter sounded a strongly cautionary
note about the new developments. "If we're serious about biofuels, we're
going to have to produce them in a much more sustainable way than intensive
agriculture has given us in the past," he said.

He voiced a concern which has already been highlighted by some environmental
groups - that mass expansion of biofuel production might lead to a new round
of rainforest destruction, especially with crops such as oil palm. Oil palm
needs warm humid conditions and is largely grown in south-east Asia on land
from which rainforest has been cleared. "Expansion of oil palm production is
going to have to be handled extremely carefully to ensure that it doesn't
start to eat into the remaining pieces of rainforest that still exist,"
Professor Crane said.

He went on: "We're going to have to get biofuels off land that's already
degraded, perhaps land that's not valuable for other purposes, for
conservation or for agriculture. And we've got to do it without creating
other problems with the kinds of inputs that in the past have gone into
intensive agriculture."

It was possible that intensive biofuel production might involve too much
nitrogen-based fertiliser, pesticides and herbicides, in order to get the
desired level of production, he said, as well as taking up enormous amounts
of scarce water in irrigation.

Sir Peter will be succeeded as director at Kew by Professor Stephen Hopper
from the University of Western Australia. In his timeat the Royal Botanic
Gardens he has been one of the leading figures in world plant conservation,
and was a principal architect of the UN's Global Plant Conservation
Strategy.

Under his direction, Kew has been leading the way in one of the strategy's
first aims - to provide a working checklist of all the plants of the world. 