Science & Technology

The Underground Climate System: Why Fungal Networks Are Being Recast as Earth’s Hidden Circulatory System

Tyler Prize honours Toby Kiers for revealing how mycorrhizal fungi regulate carbon, nutrients, and the very possibility of life on land

By Rida Staff

Updated:Wed Jan 21 2026 23:28:34 GMT+0530 (India Standard Time)

NDTV

Explanatory Ruru

1 5 10

Intensity

Le Monde

Deep-Profile Ruru

1 5 10

Intensity

Phys.org

Data-Forward Ruru

1 5 10

Intensity

Summary

Los Angeles | 20 January 2026: An American evolutionary biologist, Toby Kiers, has been awarded the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement—often described as the “Environment Nobel”—for fundamentally reshaping how science understands life beneath the Earth’s surface. Kiers’ work has brought global attention to mycorrhizal networks: vast underground webs of fungi that connect plant roots, exchange nutrients, and regulate the planet’s carbon cycle at a scale comparable to major climate systems.

The Invisible Infrastructure Beneath Forests and Farms

Mycorrhizal fungi form symbiotic partnerships with plants across forests, grasslands, and agricultural land worldwide. Through these networks, plants send carbon-rich sugars and fats below ground, while fungi deliver essential nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen back to plant roots. Recent estimates indicate that these fungal systems draw down around 13 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide every year—roughly a third of annual emissions from fossil fuels—making them one of Earth’s most important, yet least visible, climate regulators.

For decades, these fungi were treated as secondary helpers to plants. Kiers’ research reframed them instead as a core biological infrastructure—an underground circulatory system without which modern ecosystems, and even terrestrial life itself, would not exist.

Agriculture’s Hidden Dependence on Fungal Networks

Modern agriculture is among the largest, and least acknowledged, beneficiaries of mycorrhizal fungi. More than 85% of land plants, including staple crops such as wheat, rice, maize, and legumes, form symbiotic relationships with fungi to access phosphorus, nitrogen, zinc, and water that roots alone cannot efficiently extract.

However, post-war industrial farming has systematically degraded these networks. Studies from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and long-term field trials in Europe and North America show that deep tillage, monocropping, and excessive synthetic fertiliser use can reduce mycorrhizal colonisation by 40–60% within a few growing seasons. The result is a vicious cycle: declining soil biology forces farmers to apply more fertiliser, which further suppresses fungal networks and increases runoff, pollution, and input costs.

Conversely, regenerative practices—no-till farming, cover cropping, diversified rotations—have been shown to restore fungal connectivity and improve yields. A 2022 meta-analysis in Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment found that farms with intact mycorrhizal systems achieved 10–20% higher nutrient-use efficiency and greater drought resilience, particularly in semi-arid regions. In this sense, fungi function not as “natural extras” but as productive infrastructure, lowering fertiliser dependence while stabilising food systems under climate stress.

Why Climate Models Systematically Undervalue Fungal Carbon Sinks

Despite their scale, mycorrhizal fungi remain structurally under-represented in mainstream climate accounting. Most global carbon-cycle models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) prioritise above-ground biomass (trees and vegetation) and oceanic sinks, while treating soil carbon as comparatively inert or slow-moving. This modelling bias obscures the role of living soil systems—particularly fungi—in actively capturing, stabilising, and redistributing carbon.

Recent synthesis studies published in Nature Climate Change and Global Change Biology estimate that plants allocate 20–40% of their photosynthetically fixed carbon below ground, a substantial share of which flows directly into mycorrhizal networks. Research led by Kiers and collaborators suggests that fungi alone mediate the drawdown of approximately 13–13.2 billion tonnes of CO₂ annually, equivalent to roughly 30–35% of yearly fossil-fuel emissions. Yet this flux is rarely isolated or credited in national greenhouse-gas inventories.

The reasons are methodological and institutional. Fungal carbon does not respect national boundaries, is difficult to measure remotely, and is often stored as complex soil compounds rather than visible biomass. As a result, policy frameworks systematically undervalue land-management practices that protect soil ecology, even though these practices may deliver more durable climate benefits than some headline mitigation projects.

From Rainforests to a Global “Underground Atlas”

Kiers’ scientific trajectory began at the age of 19, when she secured funding to join a rainforest expedition in Panama and began asking what sustained the towering trees above ground. That curiosity led to a career spent peering into soil ecosystems, including the first time she observed an arbuscule—a tiny, tree-like fungal structure that penetrates plant cells and serves as the site of nutrient exchange.

Now a University Research Chair at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Kiers has helped build the first global maps of mycorrhizal fungi. In 2025, her team launched a worldwide Underground Atlas charting where different fungal species are found—and where they are disappearing. One of its most striking findings: many of the world’s richest underground biodiversity hotspots lie outside protected areas, leaving critical carbon stores vulnerable to land-use change.

The “Biological Marketplace” Below Our Feet

A landmark 2011 paper by Kiers, published in Science, upended assumptions about fungal behaviour. Using controlled experiments, her team showed that fungi operate as rational economic actors in what she termed a biological marketplace. Fungal networks actively redistribute nutrients from areas of abundance to scarcity and adjust their “pricing”—extracting more carbon from plants that depend on them most.

In some cases, fungi even hoard nutrients to increase demand, a strategy that mirrors human market behaviour despite the absence of a brain or central nervous system. These findings raised deeper questions about how information flows through fungal networks, with growing evidence suggesting electrical signalling may play a role.

Making the Underground Visible—and Legible to Law

More recently, Kiers and her collaborators published two Nature papers that transformed how these networks are studied. One introduced a robotic imaging system capable of observing fungal growth and nutrient flows in real time; the other provided the most comprehensive global distribution analysis of mycorrhizal fungi to date.

Why Conservation Law Has No Place for Fungi

Despite their ecological importance, fungi occupy a legal blind spot. Most conservation frameworks—national wildlife laws, biodiversity strategies, and even international agreements such as the Convention on Biological Diversity—are structured around species and habitats that are visible and taxonomically well-described. Fungi, by contrast, are poorly catalogued: scientists estimate that only 6–10% of fungal species have been formally identified.

As a result, environmental impact assessments can approve land-use change even when it destroys underground fungal networks that support entire ecosystems. A forest may be legally “protected” based on tree cover while its soil is compacted, fertilised, or chemically treated in ways that collapse mycorrhizal systems and release stored carbon.

This institutional vacuum is precisely what the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN), co-founded by Kiers, seeks to address. By mapping fungal biodiversity and training scientists in environmental law, SPUN aims to insert fungi into conservation decision-making—arguing that protecting ecosystems without protecting their underground networks is conceptually incomplete and scientifically unsound.

Coinciding with the Tyler Prize—accompanied by a $250,000 award—SPUN has launched an “Underground Advocates” programme to train scientists in legal and regulatory tools to safeguard fungal ecosystems.

Carbon Permanence: Why Fungal Storage Is Different from Tree-Based Offsets

Not all carbon sinks are equal. Much of today’s climate-finance architecture relies on tree-based offsets, which store carbon above ground and are vulnerable to reversal through fire, disease, logging, or political change. In contrast, carbon stabilised through mycorrhizal fungi is often incorporated into deep soil organic matter, where it can persist for decades or centuries.

Soil-science research published in Nature and Science indicates that fungal-derived compounds—such as glomalin and other complex polymers—are more resistant to microbial breakdown than plant litter alone. This makes fungal-mediated sequestration a high-permanence carbon sink, particularly valuable in a warming world where surface ecosystems face increasing disturbance.

From a policy perspective, this distinction matters. If carbon markets and offset standards fail to differentiate between transient and durable storage, they risk misallocating capital toward projects that look impressive on paper but deliver fragile climate benefits. Incorporating fungal systems into carbon accounting could redirect investment toward land-use practices that lock carbon underground, rather than merely postponing its release.

Why This Matters

The recognition of Toby Kiers’ work marks a broader shift in environmental thinking: from protecting what is visible on the surface to accounting for the systems that make surface life possible at all. Fungi enabled early plants to colonise land hundreds of millions of years ago, shaping soils, stabilising climates, and supporting the ecosystems humans now depend on.

As climate policy increasingly focuses on carbon sequestration, land use, and biodiversity loss, Kiers’ research underscores a critical reality: protecting forests and farms without protecting the fungal networks beneath them means ignoring one of Earth’s most powerful climate allies.

Expand

Outlet-Wise Coverage Analysis | Ruru Ratings

Outlet	Ruru Ratings	Intensity
NDTV	Explanatory Ruru	6
Notes and Context: A classic AFP “science-profile” frame: it foregrounds the idea of underground “trading systems” and the headline number—13.12 billion tons of CO₂ drawn down annually—then uses vivid analogies (“biological marketplace,” “Wall Street traders”) and a personal quote to make soil ecology legible to general readers. It also connects the prize to concrete outputs—an Underground Atlas launched last year and a new “Underground Advocates” legal-training push—while staying light on methodological detail and caveats.
Le Monde	Deep-Profile Ruru	8
Notes and Context: The most institutional, narrative-rich treatment: it situates the Tyler Prize historically (administered by USC, founded 1973, $250,000), adds committee-level validation, and spends real space explaining how the science became visible (nanoparticle tagging + robotics; interdisciplinary collaborations). It also treats SPUN’s atlas and the new “Underground Advocates” program as the bridge from research to governance, explicitly framing fungi as an “underground circulatory system.”
Phys.org	Data-Forward Ruru	7
Notes and Context: A methods-and-metrics heavy approach anchored to the Underground Atlas and the Nature paper it points to: it highlights scale (2.8 billion sequences, 130 countries, predictions at 1 km²), and makes the conservation claim quantifiable (only 9.5% of hotspots in protected areas). It includes multiple attributed expert quotes (Kiers; Sheldrake; NYU law scholar), and even carries the DOI—strong for verifiability, though written in a research-release cadence.
Down To Earth	Policy-Nudge Ruru	5
Notes and Context: Uses the atlas finding (“90%+ hotspots outside protected areas”) as the headline hook to argue—implicitly—why fungi should be pulled into mainstream climate and conservation agendas. Compared to Phys.org, it is less about methods and more about what the result means for policy priority-setting (protected areas, climate agenda inclusion).

Comparative Analysis

Convergence:

Across outlets, there is clear agreement on the central factual and scientific claims. All reports converge on the recognition that mycorrhizal fungi constitute a foundational but historically overlooked biological infrastructure, linking plant roots through vast underground networks that regulate nutrient exchange and play a major role in carbon storage. Each outlet accepts the core empirical findings highlighted by Toby Kiers’ work: that plants route a significant share of carbon below ground via fungal partners; that these networks operate at ecosystem scale rather than at the level of individual plants; and that recent global mapping efforts reveal a striking mismatch between fungal biodiversity hotspots and existing conservation frameworks, with most such hotspots lying outside protected areas.

Frame Divergence:

Where the coverage diverges is not on the science itself, but on what the story is fundamentally about. Some outlets treat the award primarily as a moment of public scientific revelation, emphasising accessibility and metaphor. Others frame it as an institutional turning point, focusing on how new data infrastructures and legal tools translate research into governance. A third strand foregrounds methodological scale and quantification, while a fourth moves rapidly from findings to policy implication. The divergence is therefore one of narrative emphasis: public comprehension, institutional legitimacy, data credibility, or policy urgency.

NDTV

NDTV’s syndicated AFP coverage frames the story as an act of scientific translation for a general audience. It foregrounds the most arresting quantitative claim—roughly 13 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide drawn down annually—alongside vivid metaphors such as “biological marketplaces” and “underground trading systems” to make soil ecology intuitively graspable. The personal voice of Toby Kiers is used to humanise the science and to challenge everyday assumptions about soil as inert “dirt.” While the article does reference concrete outputs such as the Underground Atlas and the launch of a legal training initiative, it largely treats these as extensions of a compelling narrative rather than as systems requiring detailed scrutiny.

Le Monde

Le Monde situates the Tyler Prize within a broader institutional and historical context, presenting Kiers not just as a laureate but as a scientific actor reshaping how environmental knowledge enters governance. The article devotes sustained attention to how fungal systems became observable in the first place, highlighting interdisciplinary methods such as robotic imaging, nanoparticle tracking, and global data synthesis. It also explicitly connects mapping to law, treating SPUN and the “Underground Advocates” programme as mechanisms through which invisible ecosystems are translated into policy-relevant categories. As a result, fungi are framed less as a fascinating discovery and more as a missing organ in the way environmental institutions understand the planet.

Phys.org

Phys.org adopts the most data-centric and audit-friendly approach. Its emphasis lies on the scale and resolution of the underlying research: billions of genetic sequences analysed across more than a hundred countries, predictive mapping down to kilometre-level grids, and the quantification of how little fungal biodiversity overlaps with protected areas. The article anchors these claims to peer-reviewed publications and identifiers, and broadens validation by including legal and policy voices alongside scientists. The result is a framing in which the invisibility of fungi is no longer anecdotal but statistically demonstrable, turning absence from conservation law into a measurable problem.

Down To Earth

Down To Earth treats the atlas findings primarily as a policy signal rather than a scientific milestone. The headline statistic—that over 90 percent of mycorrhizal biodiversity hotspots lie outside protected areas—is used to argue that current conservation priorities are misaligned with ecological reality. Compared with Phys.org, the article spends less time explaining how the data were generated and more time drawing out what the results imply for environmental governance, particularly in the Global South. The framing is overtly agenda-setting, positioning fungi as a missing layer in biodiversity and climate strategies that otherwise risk protecting landscapes while degrading the systems that sustain them. Together, these treatments reveal a layered media ecology around environmental science: one strand focused on public understanding, another on institutional credibility, a third on quantitative verification, and a fourth on policy consequence. The scientific claims remain consistent; it is the interpretive pathway—from discovery to decision-making—where the narratives meaningfully diverge.

Quote Spectrum

Toby Kiers (University Research Chair, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam): “Whereas a bag of dirt contains a galaxy!”

— NDTV (AFP)

Toby Kiers (Executive Director, SPUN): “For centuries, we've mapped mountains, forests, and oceans. But these fungi have remained in the dark.”

— Phys.org

Toby Kiers (Professor, VU Amsterdam): “Mycorrhizal fungi can be thought of as an underground circulatory system.”

— Le Monde

César Rodriguez-Garavito (NYU Law; MOTH Program): “Underground fungal systems have been largely invisible in law and policy.”

— Phys.org

Rida Synthesis

The underlying issue is not simply “fungi are important.” It is that the planet’s carbon-and-nutrient economy has a largely invisible operating system, and modern land-use decisions routinely disrupt it without recognising the cost. The strongest empirical signal in this cluster is the combination of

(a) enormous carbon flux claims attached to mycorrhizal exchange and storage, and

(b) the protection gap quantified via predictive biodiversity mapping (hotspots largely outside protected areas). Together, these point to a structural failure: conservation and climate policy have been built around what is easy to see (trees, habitats, charismatic species), not what is functionally indispensable (soil networks that sustain plant communities and stabilise carbon).

On coverage, the cluster shows a healthy division of labour—but also a predictable tension. Generalist syndication (NDTV/AFP) wins on reach and narrative legibility; deep newspapers (Le Monde) supply institutional context and the research-to-law bridge; science platforms (Phys.org) supply quantitative credibility and methodological scale; policy-leaning environment outlets (Down To Earth) convert results into agenda pressure. The risk is that public understanding can get trapped at the level of metaphors (“wood wide web”) unless the measurement and governance pathways—datasets, protection gaps, legal tools—stay attached to the story each time it travels.

Reference Bench (Official-Data Panel)

NDTV (AFP) — “Biologist Wins 'Environment Nobel' For Focusing On Hidden Fungal Networks”
Le Monde — “'Nobel Prize for Environment' awarded to specialist in invisible, fascinating and vital mycorrhizal fungi”
Phys.org — “Underground maps reveal 90% of mycorrhizal fungal biodiversity hotspots lie outside protected areas”
Down To Earth — “Atlas identifies areas rich in mycorrhizal fungi, some 90% of them are outside protected areas”
Tyler Prize — official prize site (award details; ceremony information).
SPUN — Underground Atlas (Mycorrhizal Biodiversity Map v1.0) landing page.
SPUN — “Launching the Underground Advocates Program” (SPUN × NYU Law MOTH partnership).
NYU Law — MOTH Program announcement of the SPUN×MOTH Underground Advocates Program.

Disclaimer: The analysis, assessments, and comparative interpretations presented above are based on a good-faith, editorial evaluation of publicly available news reports from the referenced outlets. All Ruru ratings, tone/framing observations, and analytical inferences are inherently subjective and reflect Rida’s structured rubric-based methodology rather than any claim of definitive accuracy or intent of the underlying publishers. Readers are encouraged to consult the original articles and primary sources to form their own independent understanding of the events, viewpoints, and narratives discussed. Nothing in this document should be construed as attributing motives, endorsing any political or institutional position, or making any factual representation beyond what is contained in the cited material.