Abstract
How much more research do we really need? Shouldn’t be rather focus on how to bridge the gap between academic research and real-world problem solving? We have known about medicinal plant adulteration and over-exploitation for 2000 years. At this time, awareness of geography and plant conservation was poor. So, driving a plant species to extinction and shifting to an alternative “resource-rich” frontier for a different Ferula species was understandable. Today, there is no excuse for ignorance. Or for “knowing but not doing”. Published, peer reviewed research is literally at our fingertips through the internet. Including climate change. Since Arrhenius (1896), showed that elevated CO2 levels would cause warming at a global scale. Reviews on adulteration (Foster, 2011), on unsustainable use as one of the (multiple) drivers of adulteration and substitution (Cunningham et al., 2019), and of climate change on medicinal plants (Applequiest et al., 2020) are all available. We no longer have the luxury of another 200 years, let alone 2000. We need to recognise international policy agreements goals such as WHO’s “Health for all by 2000” or the UN CBD’s Global Strategy for Plants Conservation (GSPC’s) target that “by 2010, the decline of plant resources,….that support sustainable livelihoods, local food security and health care, [would be] halted” for what they are: unrealistic dreams distracting from real world implementation. What is urgently needed is to identify challenges to implementation. Identifying pivotal, coordinated roles for applied science, the commercial sector and policy makers to bridge the “knowing but not doing gap”.