Ethnobotany Examines Cultural Knowledge Of Plants As A Tool To Limit The Climate Crisis

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Ethnobotany, which is the study of how people of a particular culture and region make use of indigenous plants, has become a go-to method to examine human life on earth and the role of plants in historical and current day cultures. Plants can help to reduce air pollution and lower the earth’s temperature. Yet, in addition to anthropogenic pressure, climate change creates adverse effects in the ecological diversity of high-value plants.

With expectations for the global surface temperature by the end of the 21st century likely to exceed 2.0 °C across many scenarios, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), ethnobotany has gained prominence as a tool to mitigate the climate crisis. Plants are harvested indiscriminately due to their usefulness in medicine, the economy, and agriculture. The need to preserve biodiversity, particularly in the case of plants, necessitates the use of ethnobotanical knowledge.

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Although it is common to think of plants as the domain of ancient peoples, even today we depend upon plants and their important pollinators for our existence and survival. Plants provide food, medicine, shelter, dyes, fibers, oils, resins, gums, soaps, waxes, latex, tannins, and even contribute to the air we breathe. Through ethnobotany, we can promote afforestation, agricultural diversity, and wild or domestic crops while also better using of land, water, and ancestral knowledge to improve local food systems.

In general, ethnobotany documents indigenous knowledge and recognizes and protects plants. This can be accomplished by cultivating them in botanical gardens or wild nurseries in habitats. Many times it involves training local people to correctly collect plant species and formulating appropriate harvesting practices.

Advancing Medicinal Knowledge at Risk without Ethnobotany

Located at the interface of natural and social sciences, ethnobotany is a discipline that addresses how a great majority of medicinal and aromatic plants (MAPs) are used locally or enter into trade. Drugs have been sourced and isolated from medicinal plants and used directly as teas or extracts. They may be used in the production of drugs, for the prevention and treatment of many diseases, or to promote the health of people or animal husbandry.

Plants are primary sources for many materials needed for all living beings, and plants are a rich source of compounds and nutritional values and are used to cure various types of ailments due to their therapeutic properties. In recent times, herbal medicine has taken on a continuing role in curing a variety of disorders or diseases compared to synthetic drugs. There has been a striking improvement in the utility of herbal medicines in almost all low-, middle-, and high-income countries due to their natural origin, cost-effectiveness, and minimal or no side effects.

Indigenous knowledge offers significant potential in plant conservation, especially for medicinal plants, which are exposed to a high risk of extinction due to widespread use. Indeed, supporting local people and their knowledge in the form of active and profitable partnerships can improve the economic conditions of local communities and be very effective in reducing direct harvesting from the habitat and preserving the environment.

Herbal industries depend on wild sources and constitute the source of livelihoods of millions of people. As international trade in medicinal and aromatic plants has grown to a multibillion dollar industry, it was reported as early as 2004 that local harvesting patterns had shifted from subsistence local collection to commercial mining. The continued growth in the global raw-material market of MAPs has further contributed to this trend over the last two decades. Species range shift is seen either at the species level or at ecosystem level, as climate change is altering the habitat, distribution, ecology, and phenology of many plant species. Species distribution and its ecological characteristics must be taken into consideration as a part of the conservation and management for the protection and sustainability.

Ethnobotany, Up Front & Personal

Documentation of ethnobotanical practices is vital for preservation of biodiverse knowledge and for the availability of this proficiency to future generations. Several widely used exotic, indigenous, and endemic plant species that have a deep rooted ethnomedicinal use have been poorly studied by the scientific community. N. M. Ganesh Babu, who heads the Centre for Herbal Gardens at the University of Trans-Disciplinary Health Sciences and Technology in Bengaluru, India, is working to change this.

During a 2024 interview with Nature, Ganesh Babu recalled how a village upbringing surrounded him with plants, to the point where “life was always lived alongside plants.” Two generations of family passed along their knowledge of plants, using proverbs to teach what natural remedies to use to treat diseases.The displacement of tribal communities away from forests has led to a quickly vanishing knowledge base of life-giving plants.

Because so much inherited wisdom of this kind had already vanished, Ganesh Babu wanted to document traditional medicine before a loss of knowledge and cultural identity served as too great a barrier. In work as a field botanist, they now conduct botanical surveys in forests across India with the help of local communities. The survey team includes doctors in traditional medicine who know the cultural significance of the plants. They collect seeds and occasion stem cuttings.

“We have a rule-of-thumb that if we see a thousand seeds,” explains Ganesh Baba, a scientist who specializes in ethnobotany, “we can collect one, because our collecting should be sustainable. We have now developed and documented techniques to propagate almost 800 wild species from seed and have created an ethnomedicinal garden spanning 20 acres that showcases the vast array of plant species used in various traditional health practices.”

They want to show that medicinal plants are aesthetic and beautiful and that it’s possible to incorporate their use in urban landscapes. In Bengaluru, for instance, they advocated the planting of native trees, which provide shade, improve air quality and support local biodiversity. This has developed into a native-plant landscaping business at the university, with clients across the professional community.

“I feel very happy that our work will directly benefit the community and the environment of the area and, ultimately, contribute to global wellness,” says Ganesh Baba on behalf of the team.