Kew Gardens secures a multimillion-pound climate change investment

theguardian.com:

Kew Gardens has secured a multimillion pound investment to help commercialise its research into climate change-resistant crops, zero-carbon fertiliser and plant- and cell-based meat and dairy products.

Greensphere Capital, a sustainability-focused fund, is aiming to invest up to £100m in the work carried out by Kew, a research institution and one of Britain’s largest botanic gardens, as well as other organisations, to commercialise and scale-up study into managing risks around the climate crisis and biodiversity loss.

The funding is designed to increase research into some of the world’s most pressing challenges, including how to feed a growing global population amid rising temperatures and increasing extreme weather events.

Alongside sustainable agriculture, the investment will help pay for extra researchers to look into botanical and fungal sciences, restoration of habitats, agriculture and forestry, with the ultimate goal of turning some projects into companies.

Greensphere – which was founded in 2011 and was the first fund manager to the government’s Green Investment Bank – is investing through its climate incubator, Gaia Sciences Innovation (GSI).

Based at a 320-acre site in southwest London, Kew is home to a collection of almost 17,000 species of plants collected from all over the world during its more than 260-year history, as well its living collections in its gardens at Kew and Wakehurst in Sussex.

The organisation is also home to the Millennium Seed Bank, an underground collection intended to conserve for the future over 2.4bn seeds from around the world including nearly all of the UK’s native plant species.

Kew believes the tie-up with Greensphere will allow it to leverage its collections, particularly when freed from