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Plant diversity is a fundamental requirement for life on earth and yet it is being lost at an alarming rate. The changing global environment presents particular challenges to the conservation of this diversity and the two are intimately linked, with approximately 18% of global carbon emissions due to deforestation and altered land use. Plant science can offer solutions to these challenges and botanic gardens are particularly well-placed to demonstrate and inspire use of plant diversity to help deal with global change. Science can provide and inform solutions such as repair and restoration of damaged wild plant communities and the use of locally and culturally appropriate plant species in agricultural, urban and suburban lands. This combination of strategies, coupled with a moratorium on the further destruction of wild vegetation, will improve the amount of atmospheric carbon absorbed by plants, and also help mitigate the coming plant extinction crisis should the world persist with a ‘business as usual’ approach.

Professor Steve Hopper is a conservation biologist and the 14th Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. He holds Visiting Professorships at the University of Reading, The University of Western Australia and at Kings Park and Botanic Garden, Perth and is a Fellow of the Linnean Society and a Corresponding Member of the Botanical Society of America. He was awarded the Nancy T. Burbidge Memorial Medal from the Australian Systematic Botany Society in 2008 and an honorary Doctor of Science degree from the University of Western Australia in 2010.  Steve Hopper has been involved in the collaborative description of over 300 new plant taxa and is author/coauthor of over 260 scientific publications (130 peer reviewed), and 14 books and monographs.  He has led the development of a forward 10 year Breathing Planet Programme for Kew and its global partners. This collaborative Programme aims to make an urgent and necessary step change in the application of science-based plant diversity solutions towards sustainable living and a reasonable quality of life in the face of accelerating climate change and the loss of biodiversity.