Kew and Hay Festival announce international partnership to highlight importance of biodiversity
Release date: 25 May 2019
A new partnership between the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (RBG Kew) and Hay Festival is being announced today at the opening of Hay Festival Wales. The partnership launches on Saturday 25th of May in Wales with a Kew-sponsored discussion, featuring Kew International Medal winner, Mary Robinson, in conversation with climate scientist Emily Shuckburgh. They will be discussing her latest book Climate Justice: Hope, Resilience, and the Fight for a Sustainable Future.
The partnership will go global at Hay Festival events in Mexico, Peru and Colombia over the course of the next year. A series of Kew branded, environmentally focused discussions and lectures will help to foster an understanding of the importance of protecting our planet and its unique biodiversity at a time of increased threats caused by land use changes and climate change, as well as pests and pathogens.
RBG Kew works in over 100 countries worldwide, to map, research and understand plants and fungi. Kew also focuses on training local people to share its vast archive of data to inform global discussions on conservation and land use. This work involves a network of partner organisations and scientists.
In Mexico, Kew has been working for over 15 years on the conservation of Mexican flora in partnership with Fes-I UNAM (Facultad de Estudios Superiores Iztacala of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), and most recently launched a new project together with Fesi-UNAM and the NGOs Pronatura México and Pronatura Veracruz, to conserve native useful trees of Mexico to maintain its natural capital.
In Peru, Kew is doing work to map land use, and recently announced a new project around seed banking to improve conservation and access to medicinal plants from the highlands of Moquegua Peru. The aim is to build scientific capacity for the collection, conservation and use of seed from wild medicinal plants. The fieldwork of the project is close to Arequipa where the Hay Festival takes place in November.
In Colombia, Kew’s Colombia Bio programme has already been underway for three years, helping to transform the Colombian economy into one based on green growth, by assisting the country to make sustainable use of its natural capital and rich biodiversity.
Earlier in 2019, Richard Deverell, Director of RBG Kew, delivered a special Hay Festival lecture in the Museo Maloka, Bogotá during his first visit to Colombia, in which he presented his vision for the role of a botanic garden in the 21st century. The new partnership will build on this to include the voices and opinions of leading writers and thinkers across the region.
On announcing the new partnership Richard Deverell, Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew said:
“In connecting with people across sectors internationally, we hope to be able to inform discussions happening around the way in which we care for our environment. Now is the time to raise awareness of the importance of plants and fungi to all our lives, because without them we could not exist. Despite this, they are often forgotten, trampled, and ignored, irreversibly damaged, and often pushed to extinction before we have even had a chance to formally identify them.
Hay Festival has become a well known and respected name internationally, and so it seems like a natural pairing for Kew. Writers and lovers of literature are such a powerful group to pair up with because they can speak for nature, and through their words, we hope others will be encouraged to take action.”
Cristina Fuentes La Roche, Hay Festival international director, said:
“We are delighted to be partnering Kew on this ambitious new project, taking their incredible wealth of expertise in biodiversity to new audiences around the world. At a time of increasing concern for the climate crisis and its wider impacts, we hope this partnership will encourage new ideas and positive conversations that can light our way forward.”
ENDS
Contact
For more information contact: pr@kew.org. Tel + 44 208 332 5605
Notes to Editors
About Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew is a world-famous scientific organisation, internationally respected for its outstanding collections as well as its scientific expertise in plant diversity, conservation and sustainable development in the UK and around the world. Kew Gardens is a major international and a top London visitor attraction. Kew’s 132 hectares of landscaped gardens, and Wakehurst, Kew’s Wild Botanic Garden, attract over 2.3 million visits every year. Kew Gardens was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in July 2003 and celebrates its 260th anniversary in 2019. Wakehurst is home to Kew's Millennium Seed Bank, the largest wild plant seed bank in the world. Kew receives approximately one third of its funding from Government through the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and research councils. Further funding needed to support Kew’s vital work comes from donors, membership and commercial activity including ticket sales.
About Hay Festival
Hay Festival is a not-for-profit organisation that brings readers and writers together to share stories and ideas in sustainable events around the world. The festivals inspire, examine and entertain, inviting participants to imagine the world as it is and as it might be.
Nobel Prize-winners and novelists, scientists and politicians, historians and musicians talk with audiences in a dynamic exchange of ideas. The Festival’s global conversation shares the latest thinking in the arts and sciences with curious audiences live, in print and online. Hay Festival also runs wide programmes of education work supporting coming generations of writers and culturally hungry audiences of all ages.
In 1987, the festival was dreamt up around a kitchen table in Hay. Thirty-two years later, the unique marriage of exacting conversations and entertainment for all ages has travelled to editions in 30 locations, from the historic town of Cartagena in Colombia to the heart of cities in Peru, Mexico, Spain and Croatia. The organisation now reaches a global audience of hundreds of thousands every year and continues to grow and innovate, building partnerships and initiatives alongside some of the leading bodies in arts and the media.
Coming up...
- Hay Festival Querétaro, Mexico (5-8 September 2019)
- Hay Festival Segovia, Spain (20-22 September 2019)
- Hay Festival Arequipa, Peru (7-10 November 2019)
- Hay Festival Hay-on-Wye Winter Weekend, Wales (28 November-1 December 2019)
- Hay Festival Medellín, Colombia (29-31 January 2020)
- Hay Festival Cartagena deIndias, Colombia (30 January-2 February 2020)
- Hay Festival Hay-on-Wye, Wales (21-31 May 2020)
- Hay Festival Europa28, Croatia (3-5 June 2020)