Supporting climate-resilient sustainable development in Africa

This project aims to characterise the value of plant biodiversity hotspots by analysing the ecosystem service provisioning of these hotspots, in Ethiopia, Guinea and Sierra Leone. Centred on the application of the Important Plant Areas approach and the Kew Tropical Important Plant Areas (TIPAs) programme, this project focuses on in situ conservation and community-based sustainable use and management of wild and agricultural plant bioresources. The ultimate goal, is to positively impact lives, livelihoods, biodiversity, ecosystems, and climate resilience.

Plant Life International established the Important Plant Areas (IPAs) system of identifying sites of global importance for plant biodiversity. This provides policy makers with a user-friendly and effective method of assessing plant diversity to better inform conservation and land-use policy, and to prioritise conservation in the areas that contain both globally threatened species and habitats, and/or sites of exceptional botanical richness.

Although areas of botanical richness are not restricted to tropical areas, exceptional species richness is consistently associated with tropical biomes. They provide a barely tapped resource for technological innovations, including but not limited to, medicine, agriculture, food security, water use, and climate resilience in the face of climate change. Therefore, documenting and conserving it, is of utmost importance so that we can protect future applications to our own well-being.

Kew, together with local in-country partners has been focused on documenting TIPAs across the globe since 2015, and this project aims to fill gaps in our documentation of species occurrence and TIPAS of the African continent. By completing the identification of tropical important plant areas (TIPAs) in Ethiopia, Guinea, and initiating identification in Sierra Leone, these areas can be prioritised for in-situ conservation and sustainable utilisation. Moreover, documenting the co-benefits for people of conserving TIPAS.