No nature, no future
- Shaun Smillie
For humans to thrive, nature must thrive. For much too long, we have disregarded this fact. Now, it’s time to set that right.
For humans to thrive, nature must thrive, but for decades, this crucial element of how the world sees and tracks progress has been lacking. We track social indicators, such as education, health and income, but the value of nature for our wellbeing, as well as the planet’s wellbeing, has been completely overlooked.
Now, a group of international scientists working under the United Nations Development Programme, including Professor Laura Pereira from the Global Change Institute at Wits and the Stockholm Resilience Centre, is arguing to include nature in the way we currently measure global progress. The proposal is to introduce a new global metric – the Nature Relationship Index (NRI) – alongside the Human Development Index. The Index will aim to track how countries care for, use and protect nature.
“We are looking to do a better job at incorporating nature,” says Pereira. “The Human Development Index did a good job of looking at education and healthcare but the nature foundation around which humans thrive is largely missing.”
Three criteria will be used: whether nature is thriving and accessible, how natural resources are being used, and whether governments are making laws and investments to protect ecosystems.
The Index is still in development but the team hopes it can debut in the 2026 Human Development Report. Hopefully, it will become a regular global measure, with countries reporting updates in the same way as they do for the Human Development Index.
“The Nature Relationship Index offers a new way of understanding whether a country is truly on a sustainable path, especially in terms of how it uses and protects its natural resources to achieve wellbeing. We thrive when nature thrives.”
A perspective article on the index was recently published in the journal Nature, with the authors calling on governments and communities to help test and shape it.
Zooming in on smaller, but critical details, Professor Kelsey Glennon from the Wits School of Animal, Plant and Environmental Sciences, is digging deep into the genes of organisms to establish what makes them thrive or perish.
Working high up in the Drakensberg, Glennon, an evolutionary biologist, and her team are studying tiny yellow flowers of the Hypoxidaceae family – better known as Star grasses – in the alpine grasslands. The study of these plants, with a flower not much bigger than a R1 coin, aims to understand how plant genomes evolve and what that means for biodiversity.
By studying hybridisation, gene flow and changes in flower colour, Glennon hopes to take a peek at the role of chromosome evolution within these plants, as well as in a different plant genus, Rhodohypoxis.
Recently, the team has also switched gears to think about genome size and how genome size within species changes across different habitat types.
“We were curious to find out if these nutrient-rich or nutrient-poor soils in the Drakensberg could predict what plants would be there and what their genome sizes would be,” says Glennon.
The preliminary findings of the Drakensberg study and Wits’ laboratory studies with Rhodohypoxis showed that a plant’s genome size differs under various soil conditions, with species in nutrient-poor alpine soils appearing to have smaller genome sizes than their sister taxa occupying more nutrient-rich lowland soils.
This could influence its survivability and be an important factor that helps sustain biodiversity. It could also predict at a species level how climate change could impact biodiversity.
“I think our success as a species depends entirely on how well we respect and treat our ecosystems,” says Glennon. “The more we know about something, the more likely we are to be responsive. An awareness of the natural world is extremely important for human resilience.”
- Shaun Smillie is a freelance writer.
- This article first appeared in?CURIOS.TY,?a research magazine produced by?Wits Communications?and the?Research Office.
- Read more in the 20thissue, themed #Thrive, which explores what it truly means to flourish — across a lifespan, within communities, and on and with our planet.