As the son of student doctors working and volunteering in Africa in the mid-1980s, Thomas Crowther spent his first birthday camping in the middle of the Sahara Desert. It was a foreshadow for a career working in the field of ecology and biodiversity: as he says, “I’ve never had a moment’s thought about what I was going to do with my life. And while I didn’t think I’d become a professor, I knew for sure it would be something nature related.”
After doing his post-doctorate at Yale, his research has encompassed estimating the number of trees on Earth and mapping the distribution of soil organisms, while driving major conservation efforts such as the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, in a mission to prove our deep reliance on nature.
Tom is also the founder of Restor, an online platform supporting thousands of community-led restoration projects around the world, and which in 2021 was a finalist for the Royal Foundation’s Earthshot Prize for providing ecological insights, transparency and connectivity to conservation and restoration efforts across the globe. Named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, he joined the Villars Institute Board in 2024 to advance nature-focused solutions to both the climate and biodiversity crises.
HIS YOUTH
Growing up, I don’t remember a moment when nature wasn’t my obsession. We used to go on holiday with a French family, and when all the kids were playing around, I just used to watch lizards sitting on a wall. I remember overhearing the grandmother of the other family saying, ‘What’s wrong with him?’ Dad angrily said, ‘What do you mean what’s wrong with him? He’s having a great time. What’s wrong with the rest of us? We don’t even notice nature!’
I studied zoology at university – but I was the bottom of the class. Being dyslexic, I hated reading. It just seemed like a million random facts. One day, I was messing around in class, and I threw my friend’s hat down the row, and it landed on the projector. The professor kicked me out – but then he took me down the pub, and said, ‘Why are you bothering studying this if you don’t care?’ I said, ‘Oh, I do care. I just can’t do it.’ He said, ‘I can see you’re smart, you just need to apply yourself.’ And then he gave me the best advice I’ve ever been given. He said, ‘You don’t need to know everything in the entire world. Try and find the bits you enjoy and do them. If you enjoy nature and biodiversity do that. If you enjoy experiments, do that.’ And what interested me was playing with bugs. So, we started doing little experiments with fungi and insects interacting in petri dishes, and I loved it. I did really well in my degree, and that same professor became my PhD supervisor. He was such an important mentor in my life.
While I was studying at Yale, I had a stroke. It was a really serious one – I thought I was going to die. But recovering from something like that gives you a different perspective and different dreams. I felt less constrained by my own angst or imposter syndrome. I thought, ‘I’ve only got one life. Let’s just go for the big questions,’ and I started doing global-scale research, taking my ecological insights from my petri dish to the globe. We started modelling global biodiversity – we did the first map of the world of tree density across the globe, which revealed the world has three trillion trees in it. That was the first big media moment in in my research career, and it set a research framework in place.
HIS RESEARCH
I’d been applying for professorships, when a university professor invited me to apply to ETH Zürich. I’d never heard of it, but within half-an-hour of visiting, I was astounded. I had never even dreamed a research environment could be like this. It’s not only the top publishing university in my field, it’s miles ahead of the next best university for publishing. It’s incredibly well-funded, with an unbelievable infrastructure. The limitations on research are no longer financial – you’re only limited by the extent of your hopes and dreams – which can be another challenge in itself!
In 2019, we published a paper that went viral – it was pretty scary! The paper, based on data from our ETH Zürich research, showed that nature is crucial for fighting climate change – and that it could achieve one-third of our climate goals. Suddenly, media headlines took off, and we started getting contacted by tens, then hundreds… then thousands of people, farmers, communities, all asking for our biodiversity data. I couldn’t possibly reply to all those emails, so we decided to build a platform called Restor, where they could access the data for free. It's like Google Maps, but instead of coffee shops and hairdressers, you can draw around your garden and get data on the species, carbon, and water in your area. As more projects and communities joined in, it became so more valuable than just a data-sharing platform, it evolved into a social media platform. Now, you can zoom in and see hundreds of thousands of farmers and Indigenous communities, and even every single tree growing on the ground. Google came in to help us build it, and it’s been really exciting to see how it's taken off.
ON NATURE
Nature is such a broad topic for us to be congregating around but absurdly, it’s the one that’s been left behind: the climate movement is flying, but ecological integrity is just one tiny sliver of that. And that’s not a fair representation of nature.
Nature is everything. Nature is the only thing that ever allowed us to survive on the planet. Nature is the source of all inspiration and all cultural creation. It is the source of everything. So, it should be absolutely the thing we come together around.
My mission in life is to prove to everyone how desperately we all need nature. And it’s the best mission because all the data I’ve ever generated, repeatedly points towards that fact. It’s very hard to find an instance where nature wouldn’t be beneficial to our survival. Obviously, there are trade-offs; for example, if you’ve got a full forest and you want to have a farm – but in so many cases, removing that forest entirely means you can’t do the farm anyway. People think there’s a trade-off between humans and nature and that’s just been made up over the last 100 years. It’s an absolute fallacy.
We need is to extend our horizons and extend our hopes and expectations into a better future. And it is only through that that we’re ever going to be able to reach for something better.
If we’re crippled with anxiety about the state of the world or the state of nature and biodiversity and climate change, our deepest evolutionary reactions are to fight or flight. We either hate each other and attack each other or we stick our head in the sand and avoid. Neither of those immediate reactions are going to be helping us in this challenge.
Climate change is happening, but it doesn’t mean we can’t make a better future. And whether climate change was happening or not, I would be exactly as motivated to try and make a better future. We’ve just got to make sure the youth are still living those dreams.
ON VILLARS
The Villars Institute is a unique organisation. I’ve not encountered anything like it before. It’s a platform for systems change, bringing communities across generation and disciplines together. And because we’re convening a spectacular, magical locations, it already opens your mind, even before we share our collective experience. It’s not drumming evidence into you, it’s opening up a space for a conversation about our collective shared connection to nature.
I’m honoured to be on the board at Villars – it fits perfectly with my ambition. I feel science can be a really powerful addition to this conversation, and that’s what I’m hoping to bring to the board. When we publish a big paper, the whole world reacts to it. And science can really amplify the messages being discussed. Collectively, our mission should be that we need to get the nature movement to at least where the climate change movement is, in the coming years. We need this to be at the top of everyone’s agendas. Because it’s essential for our survival.
