Fungi are missing from environmental impact assessments

Before a mine, a road or a dam is built, the developer has to describe what will disappear with it. Such a report lists plant and animal species, estimates the losses and proposes compensatory measures. Fungi are usually absent from it — not because they are absent from the site, but because nobody is required to count them.

Four authors from Brazil, among them Ricardo da Silva Ribeiro, made this point in a correspondence published in Nature on 23 June 2026. Their starting point is the country's first national list of threatened fungi, announced on 1 June. It recognises 24 species, 21 of them as vulnerable and 3 as endangered. That is about 0.3 per cent of the fungal species known from Brazil.

The existence of the list is itself a change. Brazilian law long covered only fauna and flora, and fungi fell outside the term altogether. Decree 12,137 of 12 August 2024 widened it, which is what opened the way to the list. The authors point out, however, that a list compels nothing until it becomes part of the impact assessment procedure — and that requires mycologists on the teams carrying those assessments out.

The argument is not a Brazilian one. It was written where the dispute happens to be live, but the gap is general. The same problem is set out in an earlier paper by Isadora Amaral-Silva and co-authors in Biological Conservation, where this thread began. Poland has its own version of the same difficulty: the regulation protecting fungal species is in force, but whether a protected fungus on a development site is detected depends on whether anyone looked there at the right point in the season.

It is worth being clear about what this material is. It is a letter to the editor, a contribution to a debate rather than a research result. It carries no data on how many fungal localities have actually been destroyed, nor any estimate of how far species lists would change development decisions. We mark it as a report, and it should be read as one.

The reason this is hard is substantive, not merely bureaucratic. A fungus is difficult to count: the fruit body appears for a few days a year and only in the right weather, and for the rest of the time the organism sits in soil or wood and is not visible at all. A survey carried out on one day in July will see nothing. Environmental DNA methods solve part of this, but they are not yet standard in the procedures.

What remains is a conclusion that reaches beyond one country. Protection begins with something being counted — and fungi are still absent from most assessments, so formally they lose nothing on these sites.

Source status — 29 August 2026

The 23 June 2026 piece is a short expert Correspondence in Nature, not an independent fungal census. It refers to Brazil’s first national threatened-fungi list, issued on 1 June: 21 species were classed as vulnerable and three as endangered. Those 24 species amount to about 0.3% of the fungal species currently known from Brazil, not 0.3% of the country’s full, largely undescribed diversity. A supporting Biological Conservation study documents the omission of funga from impact reports. The conclusion is policy-oriented and practical: without a requirement to collect fungal data, loss cannot be evaluated before a development proceeds.