Most of the world's population suffers from inadequate access to health care: for example, every year nearly 11 million children die before their fifth birthday, and half a million women die in childbirth.
The protection and maintenance of human health is strongly dependent upon plant products and their derivatives. The majority of the world's population lacks access to conventional western medicine and depends upon plants for primary healthcare. It is estimated that 80% of the world's population depends directly on plant based medicines and the trade in medicinal plants is estimated to be worth about $60 million per year in South Africa alone.
However, continued access to this global resource is threatened by environmental degradation and unsustainable collecting. Botanical gardens can play an important role, by empowering communities to safeguard and improve access to plants used in healthcare.
Botanical gardens' projects often involve garden staff demonstrating uses of plants for healthcare, and enabling communities to cultivate such plants. The Nature Palace Botanic Garden in Uganda, for example, works with households in a local community-based conservation and development group. Participants have learnt about the cultivation and conservation of medicinal plants through workshops, field demonstrations, model farms and leaflets. They have subsequently gone on to set up individual gardens for medicinal plant cultivation, and are also planning a communal garden for this purpose.
Gardens often work closely with local healthcare institutions to ensure local needs are met. For example, in South Africa, Garden Route Botanical Garden works with local people to facilitate their access to and use of medicinal plants: this project was started at the instigation of the Kynsna Municipal Healthcare clinic, to help them manage demand for their services.
Careful planning and multidisciplinary thinking can help to ensure projects realise their potential. This is demonstrated by a project to promote the use of plants for self-sufficiency in basic healthcare, run by the Tropical Botanic Garden & Research Institute (TBGRI) in Kerala, India. Pushpangadan describes how the healthcare needs and socio-economic situation of four villages in the Thiruvananthapuram District were carefully examined by a TBGRI team that included botanists, Ayurvedic experts and sociologists. This team then worked with villagers to deliver a combination of lectures, seminars, demonstrations, practical training and plant supplies that enabled villagers to identify and cultivate healthcare plants.
The TBGRI team also trained villagers in the preparation of compound drugs for home remedies to treat problems such as burns, wounds, sprains and diarrhoea. This project was so successful that other villages requested to become involved, and eventually over 800 families were helped. Healthcare concerns may be quite different in developed countries. For example, Kärten Botanical Garden in Austria runs lectures and school projects based around drug plants, to educate children about the realities and dangers of drug abuse.
Botanical gardens in developed countries have also been instrumental in developing the widely recognised psychological treatment "Horticultural Therapy". This is practiced in gardens from Irkustsk, Russia to Cleveland, USA. Although it is a less obvious application of plants and botanical gardens, it is potentially of great importance, as 25% of individuals will develop mental disorders during their life. This example clearly demonstrates the need for us to consider the full potential of plants for tackling the spectrum of healthcare issues, so that plant resources can be used most effectively.
Many gardens in developed countries have formed partnerships with institutions in other countries, to assist people in less developed countries. A good example of this is provided by the many projects in which the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew is involved. These include a project in Uganda to develop the use of plants to tackle HIV/AIDS, and a project to use plants to tackle tuberculosis in South Africa.
These projects allow expertise to be shared across countries and cultures: so for example, staff from Geneva Botanic Garden exchange information with Paraguay counterparts, some of whom then contribute to similar projects in Bolivia. The partnerships and collaborations involved in these projects can also build regional institutional capacity for future self-management of activities for environmentally sound development and environmental education.
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