The inextricable link between climate change and biodiversity.

Our ability to reach net zero heavily rests on the capacity of governments to implement carbon capture mechanisms to trap emissions at the source. Yet biodiversity comes fully equipped with the tools to soak up plenty more besides - if we can just allow it to thrive, rather than continue to exploit and destroy it.

A read through of the latest technologies being announced ahead of the COP26 meeting in Glasgow focuses on giant, complicated machines and complexes designed to trap carbon dioxide released from heavy industry and store it in rocks under the sea, or other such places.

One interesting example exists in Yorkshire, where a power plant that formerly burned coal now purports to produce green energy, and a carbon capture facility alongside it. Its credentials appear less green when you discover the plant reportedly now burns wood chips imported from the USA.

Meanwhile, Dame Judi Dench and others point out that we already have some pretty decent carbon gobblers in the form of the very same trees being chopped down to fuel such formerly coal-fired power stations.

It’s likely that carbon capture in this way will be better than what we had been doing, but there are obvious pitfalls in an over-reliance on this technology. For a start, there’s not nearly enough of it around - nor is the technology sufficiently advanced - for us to meet our net zero goals for 2050.

Tree planting, too, is fraught with complications. It’s only truly beneficial if we can plant the right species to rejuvenate biodiverse ecosystems, rather than producing relatively lifeless monocultures. Planting the wrong trees in the wrong places can be disastrous.

Perhaps we should invest equally in what’s right beneath us.

That’s the argument in a recent article from Mongabay, which points out that 80% of the carbon stored on land can be found in our soils. Yes, trees are very efficient at capturing CO2, but healthy soil is what allows that to happen.

Biodiverse soils are particularly important, as it’s the cocktail of bacteria, fungi, protists, archaea, nematodes and earthworms that keep plants thriving in diverse ecosystems. They help power the nutrient cycling process that keeps plants nourished with nitrogen and able to sequester all the more carbon dioxide from the air.

The Earlham Institute’s Dr Nasmille Larke-Mejía is intimately aware of this issue, telling the EDP recently that “the amount of sterile soil is increasing year on year… Soils are living, dynamic systems that are very sensitive to environmental pressures like climate change, rain and erosion – but they're also sensitive to things we add.”

She’s hoping to tackle a huge problem in soils, that of declining diversity due to the addition of agrichemicals and other pollutants. A knock-on effect of this is that our crop plants are less capable of fending off disease, as the natural defenses that a biodiverse soil provides to plants is eroded.

In searching for healthier soils, Dr Larke-Mejía has also noticed how formerly saprophytic fungi - much like the ash dieback pathogen researched by Dr Mark McMullan and colleagues at the Earlham Institute - have become pathogenic on coffee plantations. Perhaps it’s a lack of soil diversity that fosters conditions for these pathogens to take hold in the first place.

While Larke-Mejía, McMullan and colleagues are investigating the root cause of such agricultural pathogens, it’s likely that fostering healthier soils is a better long-term solution to disease control - and preventing pathogen outbreaks in the first place - than wantonly spraying pesticides.

From the soils to the skies, the ash clouds from Australian wildfires shrouded parts of the globe in a veil of smog in the early months of 2020. Where the dust eventually settled, algae proved their worth as the world’s most overlooked gobblers of carbon dioxide.

Most of the CO2 released from these fires was eaten up by algal blooms, which thrived on the minerals deposited in the ash. While that’s a success story of the capacity of the Earth to offset some of our emissions, it’s not all rosy - particularly when you consider that rose-tinted seas formed by toxic algal blooms pose a hazard to other life, including us.

While a natural occurrence and part of a yearly cycle, algal blooms are intensifying in certain regions due to the leaching of fertilisers into our oceans. In particular, this is causing expanding ‘dead zones’ to appear around river estuaries.

Elsewhere, shifting temperatures are causing populations of algae to change, as those adapted to cooler temperatures drift further north. PhD students Anthony Duncan and Emma Langan have been tracking those changes at the Earlham Institute, which will be important in helping model the effects our polluting ways are having on the seas.

All the while, our once-vibrant coral reefs - another ecosystem underpinned by healthy algae living in symbiosis with polyps - are being bleached by rising CO2 levels in the oceans. This visible change shows the strain our actions are putting on one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet, and crucial breeding waters for fish.

Our soils, seas, inland lakes and rivers are clearly crucial for maintaining food security, and allowing them to prosper can help us to mop up emissions. But they’re more important than just that.

Biodiversity sings to our very souls, as poets and artists over millennia can attest. Time spent in nature is not only good for our minds and wellbeing (and as Earlham researchers prove, the source of untapped medicines), but for creativity.

It’s pleasant to imagine, as we move into what may well be a decade of restoration of nature, that spending more time in it could well inspire our minds with the solutions to keep biodiversity and humanity thriving side by side for millennia to come.