2023-05-21 15:01:00
What is the greenest university in Europe? Starting Monday, Wageningen will compete with sixteen other universities in a biodiversity competition. It’s not regarding winning though.
Liesje Mommer is hoping for a report from Iceland that there are puffins on campus. The ‘Penguins of the North’ breed on coastal rock formations, so the chances of spotting them in the capital Reykjavik are slim, but who knows. The University of Iceland would be very successful in the biodiversity challenge which officially starts on Monday.
Not that it’s regarding winning, says Mommer, professor of plant ecology and figurehead of biodiversity at Wageningen University and Research (WUR). “Seventeen European universities, from Iceland to Ukraine to France, will look for everything that lives and grows and flourishes on their own campus, and of course we hope for rare species and something that was not there before. But it’s not regarding who has the most species, but regarding sharing beautiful sightings. By looking together, we connect with each other and with the diversity of species. If you don’t know what’s there, you can’t protect it.”
Intertwine with each other
Mommer took the initiative for the green cover at her university two years ago. “There is now a network of scientists who put biodiversity first in what they do. These are not only ecologists, but also among food technicians, animal scientists, economists and behavioral specialists, biodiversity is a crucial subject. And the students keep us sharp.”
Last autumn, in the Mansholt lecture on a ‘nature-positive future’, Mommer explained where the opportunities lie in the food system, how nature can help to cope with extreme weather as a result of climate change and why a ‘system transition’ in which we collaborate with the nature, rather than once morest it, is only achievable by interweaving different forms of intervention.
“We work with all scientific disciplines and with all kinds of stakeholders in society,” she says. “We should not only look at the farmers, but also at the landscape. To what we eat, how we can promote health, how the financial systems work. Connection is needed, between the ministries, but also between universities, financial institutions, hospitals and supermarkets. We have to include everyone in it.”
From the fool
The agricultural agreement, which has not yet been concluded, is only a first step towards a better world, says Mommer. “More is needed, also in other areas of society. If we have green schoolyards, our children also understand it better. It is crazy that the cheapest choice in the supermarket is usually the worst for nature and therefore for our own well-being.”
After her lecture, which bears the name of the legendary minister and European Commissioner of Agriculture Sicco Mansholt, Mommer was invited to Brussels. WUR researchers also won three European studies, “on the changes in society that are necessary to secure a liveable planet for future generations”.
It is now widely understood that climate change and biodiversity are two sides of the same coin, says Mommer. “But it doesn’t happen automatically. Guidance is needed”. That’s what science can deliver.
Push ball up the hill
“When the Ipbes report came out four years ago, which states that one million animal and plant species are at risk of extinction, I thought: this is so complicated, no one can solve it. But we have to do it together, we have to push that ball up the hill together, and then maybe we can.”
That’s not easy. “The quality of 60 to 70 percent of the soils in Europe is seriously affected: compacted, polluted, dried out. I find that a shocking number. Some areas are already becoming unlivable. See the images of the drought in southern Europe this spring…. sooo dry. It makes a lot of difference to humanity whether the earth will warm up by 1.8 or 2.3 degrees. I am seriously concerned regarding that. So we have to get to work, what we do really matters. The biodiversity competition fits in with that.”
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For decades, Wageningen University laid the scientific foundations for intensive agriculture, but now the knowledge center wants to boost the ‘green transition’. ‘Introducing biodiversity into the agricultural system is the only way to turn the tide,’ says professor Liesje Mommer.
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