Natural history museums can help save the planet

When eight million hectares of vegetation were incinerated during south-eastern Australia’s bushfires of 2019-20, it was data from herbarium collections that guided that guided the restoration of these vital habitats. In France, an unrecorded population of critically endangered giant freshwater mussels was discovered thanks to the location documented on a historic shell in a museum. The river is now being protected.

The University Museum of Zoology in Cambridge, has tens of thousands of insect specimens collected in the 1820s, before the vast wetlands of the Fens were drained during the industrial revolution. We are now working with our local Wildlife Trust to use these records to guide their work to restore these environments and to best manage their biodiversity. 

These are just some of the reasons why it’s true to say that natural history museums can help save the planet.

And since their inception, these museums have been fundamental to the science of classification – they are the permanent, physical repositories for understanding biodiversity. Without them, we couldn’t comprehend how many forms of life exist and have existed. In turn, without that knowledge, informed environmental conservation would be impossible.

But on top of this foundational task as a catalogue of life, new uses for collections are constantly being discovered. Museums house the world’s best evidence for environmental change over the past few centuries. The most basic information a specimen might provide is what it is, when it was collected and where – proving that a given species was found in a certain place at a particular time. Worldwide, natural history museums care for over a billion specimens, so comparing records for a species across time and space allows us to understand how and why their ranges have shifted because of human activity and climate change, as well as predicting where they will be able to survive.

They also hold hidden data beyond the facts of their own existence. Pollen on pinned bees reveals what plants lived where the pollen was collected, while a specimen’s chemical signatures discloses the environmental conditions they experienced. The pollutants attached to bird feathers, meanwhile, have provided the best evidence for how much black carbon from burning coal was in the atmosphere during periods of industrial development in the US. 

These scientific discoveries are happening at a time when natural history museums are beginning to properly explore their colonial legacies, and we should think of this work as being connected. Many of the threats species face – from habitat-loss to invasive species and resource extraction – are consequences of colonialism, and the human and environmental costs are deeply entwined.

Our museums are important for understanding both – these collections have only ever grown in relevance. The planet needs saving in more ways than one, but with their potential to address environmental breakdown and matters of social justice, natural history museums stand to play an enormous role in how we navigate the future.

Jack Ashby is the assistant director of the University Museum of Zoology in Cambridge, and author of Nature’s Memory: Behind the Scenes at the World’s Natural History Museums