Article published on the Nature.com website
Despite its importance, microbial life is largely absent from global conservation frameworks. Launched in July 2025, the Microbial Conservation Specialist Group (MCSG) was established as a Species Survival Commission (SSC) by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The IUCN is the world’s leading authority in environmental science and policy, renowned for shaping conservation priorities across governments, non-governmental organizations and international treaties. The MCSG convenes a coalition of microbiologists, ecologists, traditional knowledge experts and conservation leaders to develop and advocate for conservation tools, strategies and policies that explicitly integrate microbiology into global biodiversity governance. Despite the importance of microorganisms for ecosystem function, their role has been seen as too abstract or complex to integrate into policy. Elevating microbial perspectives within global conservation has required overcoming a deep-rooted tendency to overlook the invisible.
First, we will build a global network, including experts from low- and middle-income countries and Indigenous communities, to advise on conservation targets and build an evaluation schema for assessing conservation priorities. To ensure broad and inclusive representation, we are actively inviting experts through a snowball approach, encouraging nominations from our members, and issuing open calls for participation via the IUCN and MCSG websites. We will also prioritize language accessibility, regional balance, and engagement with early-career researchers and traditional knowledge holders to foster equitable participation. Second, we will map conservation priorities by compiling and visualizing global data on microbial ecosystems that are currently threatened by habitat destruction and anthropogenic activity. Third, we will develop microorganism-specific Red List criteria, the globally recognized system used by the IUCN to classify species at high risk of extinction. Our aim is to incorporate microbial features, including metabolic and ecological resilience, rather than individual species abundance, which is more typical with Red List criteria for macroorganisms. Finally, we will map existing microbial conservation projects, such as microorganism-assisted coral restoration and soil microbiome rewilding, and develop criteria to incorporate them into current IUCN efforts, optimize their application and assess their success. Throughout, we will integrate microbial experts into other IUCN SSC groups (such as those exploring conservation priorities for threatened fungi and wildlife, including corals, amphibians and insects) to ensure that specific microbiological considerations are consistently represented wherever conservation decisions are made...
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Article published on the Nature.com website
