The Tyler Prize, considered the "Nobel Prize for the environment", was awarded to Toby Kiers, an American biologist working in Amsterdam.
The Tyler Prize, also known as the "Nobel Prize for the environment", was awarded this year to Toby Kiers, an American mycologist and biologist, for her work on fungal networks and their capacity to absorb carbon dioxide.
We are talking about mycorrhizae — fungi that grow in symbiosis with surrounding plants. Most people have come across them at some point in their lives: they can be found on the floors of woodlands, grasslands or even in agricultural soils. They form immense fungal networks that constitute vital mechanisms for ecosystems.
They are capable of transferring nutrients to plant roots, which is precisely why their presence is mutually crucial. But there is more: these fungal networks are also able to play a particularly important role in mitigating climate change, as they absorb 13.12 billion tonnes of CO2 every year across the world, thereby limiting the rise in average global temperature.
Until recently, however, the contribution of these fungi had been considerably underestimated: they were thought to be simply useful to plants, rather than to Earth's global systems. It was by mapping the worldwide distribution of mycorrhizae through an atlas published for the first time last year that Toby Kiers and the researchers who took part in the study brought to light invaluable knowledge for understanding planetary equilibria.
Today we know that protecting these vast fungal networks represents a way of combating the climate crisis as well. The more than 13 billion tonnes represent roughly one third of total emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels: coal, oil and gas.
"I often think about all the ways in which land is used negatively, while a single bag of soil contains an entire galaxy", Kiers declared, working at Vrije University in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. The scientist began studying fungi 19 years ago, after taking part in an expedition to the tropical forests of Panama. "At that point I began asking myself what was happening beneath those gigantic trees, in that jungle so full of life".
The Tyler Prize is awarded by the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Recipients receive a prize of 250,000 dollars.
