Dutch evolutionary biologist Dr Toby Kiers won the 2026 Tyler Prize for her groundbreaking work revealing that mycorrhizal fungi absorb roughly a third of global fossil fuel emissions each year.
Beneath almost every forest on Earth, and beneath many grasslands, fields and gardens, there is a network. It is made of fungi, extending through the soil in threads so fine that a teaspoon of healthy forest soil can contain several kilometres of them. These mycorrhizal fungi connect with the roots of plants, exchanging nutrients for sugars in a partnership that has existed for hundreds of millions of years. And new research suggests they are doing something else as well: absorbing around 13 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year.
Dr Toby Kiers, an evolutionary biologist at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands, has spent years mapping these fungal networks and understanding how they function. Her research has demonstrated that mycorrhizal fungi are responsible for drawing down carbon on a scale that makes them one of the most significant regulators of atmospheric CO2 on the planet. Thirteen billion tonnes annually represents roughly a third of total global fossil fuel emissions.
The Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, awarded in 2026, recognised her work as outstanding in environmental science, with benefits for humanity that extend well beyond the academic world. The prize, which comes with 250,000 US dollars, is often described as the Nobel Prize for the environment. It has previously been awarded to scientists working on ozone depletion, ocean conservation and atmospheric chemistry.
The practical implications of Dr Kiers’s findings are significant. Mycorrhizal networks are damaged by tillage agriculture, by synthetic fertilisers that make plants less dependent on fungal partnerships, and by land use changes that destroy the plant communities the fungi support. Understanding the scale of the carbon service they provide strengthens the case for farming practices that protect soil biology rather than working against it.
The research also opens questions about how these networks might be actively supported or restored in degraded landscapes. If fungi are absorbing 13 billion tonnes of CO2 annually under current conditions, what might be possible if their networks were more intact, more widespread, more healthy?
Something invisible is doing enormous work. Dr Kiers has helped make that something visible, and in doing so has added a new dimension to how the world thinks about carbon, soil and the living systems that connect them.
Source: Euronews Green