Clusia, native to the South American tropical rainforest, is a plant widely grown in Korea for air purification. In contrast, Indigenous peoples in the Amazon, where it is native, have long used Clusia schultesii (C. schultesii) as a remedy for skin diseases. Locals, who do not need air purification, effectively prioritized its medicinal effects.
A warning has been issued that climate change could erase not only Amazonian tropical plants but also the related cultural heritage. If plants disappear from the Amazon, it does not simply mean one fewer species; it means the culture that has used them will be cut off across generations. The Amazon's Donguibogam, a potential treasure trove for new drugs, would vanish.
◇ Loss of knowledge about medicinal plants, a serious blow to healthcare
A team led by Professor Rodrigo Cámara-Leret of the University of Zurich's Department of Systematic and Evolutionary Botany said on the 9th in the international journal Nature that "computer simulations of responses to climate change showed that, if greenhouse gas reductions are not achieved properly, the number of native plant species used in Amazonian Indigenous cultural areas will decrease by one-third."
The researchers collected more than 90,000 documents recording cases of people using plants in the Amazon rainforest from 1504 to 2023. The analysis found that the number of native plant species used by Amazonian peoples reaches 5,796. That is more than double previous estimates. It corresponds to one-third of Amazonian seed plants and accounts for 36% by the paper's measure.
The team simulated the impact of climate change on species distributions from 2060 to 2080 under three scenarios: meeting greenhouse gas reduction targets, minimal response, and no response. The analysis predicted that, by scenario, the decline rates of plant species used locally would be 28%, 30% and 34%, respectively. Rather than meaning plants go completely extinct in the Amazon, it indicates that they can no longer be used to that extent within local cultural areas.
Amazonian cultural areas have used plants diversely as food, medicine, and building materials. The simulation showed that climate change would reduce these plant-provided services by 18% to 23%. In the records, medicinal use topped the list of plant uses in the Amazon. If Amazonian plants decline due to climate change, local healthcare systems could be hit.
◇ Worsening conditions intertwined with the risk of language extinction
The study revealed that climate change threatens not only nature but also humanity's cultural heritage. The researchers projected that, as plant use declines in the Amazon and intersects with the recent acceleration of Indigenous language loss, 26% of knowledge related to useful plants could disappear by the end of the century.
In the Amazon, knowledge about plant uses often remained only within specific linguistic and cultural groups. According to the paper, 74% of plant services were linked to a single cultural group. This means knowledge such as which plant works well for which disease and how to harvest and process it was transmitted only within particular communities.
However, many of the 243 Amazonian Indigenous cultures analyzed in this study have already vanished or their languages are under threat. The researchers said that more than half of the 156 Amazonian Indigenous languages analyzed in the paper face extinction. Knowledge about plants is at risk of disappearing along with the languages.
The extinction of minority languages is a global phenomenon. A team led by Stephen Levinson of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Germany released a paper in the international journal Language in 2018 stating that more than half of the roughly 7,000 languages used by humanity are at risk of extinction. Of these, 577 are already nearly extinct, and now only the grandparent generation uses them occasionally. The Jeju dialect was included.
Victoria Reyes-García, a professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain, said in a commentary published in Nature that "this study shows that the biodiversity crisis has a major impact on Indigenous societies," adding, "the Amazon's crisis is both a biological and a cultural crisis." She noted that it clearly shows how plant species decline and language loss intertwine to erode the Amazon's biocultural heritage.
Reyes-García also noted that the risk estimated in this study may be lower than in reality. While the paper focused mainly on climate change and language loss, in the actual Amazon, deforestation, the influx of alien species, and development pressures act simultaneously. She said that when these factors combine, the loss of plants and cultural knowledge could be greater.
References
Science (2026), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10741-y
Science (2026), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-01874-1
Language (2018), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2018.0070