Thomas Ward Crowther (born 1986) is professor of ecology and founding co-chair of the Advisory Board for the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. He is the president of the BRANCH institute - an international network of research groups in leading universities across 6 countries, studying the linkages between global biodiversity and human wellbeing. Crowther is the founder of Restor, an online platform that supports thousands of community-led restoration projects around the world. In 2021, the World Economic Forum named Crowther a Young Global Leader. He founded Crowther Lab, an interdisciplinary group of scientists exploring the role of biodiversity in regulating the Earth's climate.
Career Crowther conducted his undergraduate and PhD studies at Cardiff University, under the supervision of Dr. Hefin Jones. Following his PhD, Crowther received a postdoctoral fellowship from the Climate and Energy Institute at Yale University. In 2015, Crowther was awarded a Marie Curie fellowship to research the impact of carbon cycle feedbacks on climate change at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO). In 2017, Crowther obtained a tenure track professorship at ETH Zürich. In 2024, ETH Zürich decided not to extend Crowther's contract following accusations of misconduct. Crowther denied any wrongdoing. According to a Swiss newspaper, ETH announced internally that "the allegations of personal misconduct would not be further investigated, as clear evidence was lacking", and dozens of current and former lab members came out in support of Crowther following the accusations. In a recent clarification report, ETH acknowledged that there was "further information that contradicts parts of the statements made by the three individuals" whose allegations formed the basis of the investigation. The report also concluded that "the allegation of having misused donated funds cannot be confirmed." Nevertheless, the report stated that Crowther "breached internal rules in a number of areas and on several occasions." ETH Zurich maintained its decision not to renew Crowther's contract, which lead to the dissolution of his research group. Since leaving ETH, Crowther has relocated to King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.
Research Crowther is a leader in the field of global biodiversity research. His work is best known for helping to develop the field of global restoration ecology. This work has formed the scientific motivation for international conservation and restoration initiatives including the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, and the Trillion Tree Campaigns of the World Economic Forum, WWF and UNEP. His early work focused on soil biodiversity and their interactions with plants. In the journal Science, he stressed that "soil organisms represent the most biologically diverse community on land". His research has mapped the distribution of mycorrhizal fungi and nematodes across global soils, revealing the importance of these soil organisms for global carbon cycling. Crowther's work highlights how warming of soils can increase the rates of carbon emissions from soil. In 2016, Crowther's research suggested that warming might stimulate the activity of soil organisms in high-latitude arctic and sub-arctic soils, leading to the loss of 30 Gt of carbon by 2050, which could accelerate climate change by 12-17%. Crowther stresses that protecting the soil community might be one of the best way to buffer ecosystems against these potential impacts of climate change. In 2015, Crowther led an international team to show that the Earth is home to approximately 3.04 trillion trees. The research also estimated that humans have reduced that number by almost half, and Earth continues to lose around 10 billion trees each year. Ongoing research on global forests also showed that there are over 79,000 tree species in the global forest system, and that the productivity of forests increases as species diversity increases. Crowther's work has estimated the global tree restoration potential, showing that there are 0.9 billion hectares of land where trees would naturally be able to grow outside of urban and agricultural land. If this land could be protected, the study suggested that this is room for one trillion new trees, and the recovering ecosystems could capture over 205 Gt carbon. Crowther has described nature restoration as one of the most effective carbon drawdown strategies to date, with the potential to help people, biodiversity, and climate. A number of scientists criticized the idea that planting trees across the globe is a simple solution to climate change. In particular, several articles suggested that it is dangerous and misleading to propose that tree planting can be a silver bullet to stop climate change. Crowther agreed with those criticisms, stating that ecosystem restoration cannot be used as an excuse to ignore the challenges of cutting greenhouse gas emissions and protecting existing ecosystems. He also emphasized that ecosystem restoration is not simply about planting trees for carbon capture. Instead, it is about the many solutions that promote the protection, regeneration and sustainable management of nature for local people and the biodiversity that they depend on. Crowther warned about the risks of mass tree plantations, highlighting the need for socially and ecologically responsible restoration of ecosystems across the globe. Following this work, Crowther teamed up with 220 scientists to create the Integrated Forest Assessment. They showed that the conservation and recovery of diverse forests can account for roughly 1/3 of our climate change mitigation requirements, providing empirical data to support the commitments made under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the Glasgow Leaders Declaration on Forests and Land Use.
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