Microbiome stewardship is about protecting environments and creating practices that maintain microbial biodiversity and function - basically, that allow diverse microbiomes to continue to exist and do their thing. Stewarding microbiomes will support the health and well-being of humans, animals, plants, and ecosystems.
To steward microbiomes, we must take conscious, strategic action to protect microbiomes from human and other activities that lead to deteriorating health.
To be effective, microbiome stewardship requires collective action at all levels:
Institutional practices, like hospital guidelines around unnecessary antibiotic use
National policies, like regulations for agricultural pesticides that we know cause damage, and
Global standards, like an international agreement on microplastics
Why Microbiome Stewardship?
The idea of microbiome stewardship is based on a few very important observations:
Microbiomes are important. Perhaps more important than we’ve recognized before. They provide essential functions to human, plant, animal, and ecosystem health
Microbiomes are shared. Across individuals and species – we get our microbes from the environments around us.
Our human actions have damaged microbiomes. You may have heard about connections between the gut microbiome and irritable bowel disease, for example. But in fact, many headline-worthy issues have a microbiome component that often doesn’t make it into the spotlight, like declining honeybee populations and global warming.
As individuals, there are limits to what we can do to reverse, stop, or prevent damage to microbiomes. However, collectively, through laws, regulations, and institutional practices, we can act to protect microbiomes and the health of living things that depend on them.
An example of effective societal action can be found in response to air pollution. Making clean air canisters for individuals to purchase is not a good solution. Instead, preventing or minimizing pollution from occurring in the first place ensures clean air for all.
Microbiome stewardship requires a similar approach. Because microbiomes are so important and damage is occurring at the societal level, we need to protect microbiomes at the societal level. Hence, microbiome stewardship.
What Does Microbiome Stewardship Look Like?
Because microbiomes are so diverse – varying across contexts and across domains of human activity – stewardship of microbiomes will look different across contexts and domains.
As a first step towards implementing microbiome stewardship, we have proposed a series of guiding principles. They are intentionally broad, to allow for application across different contexts, and they are organized into three sections:
Premises: foundational knowledge of the importance of microbial life as a foundation of all other life on Earth.
Responsibilities: because humans and other organisms are reliant on microbial life, we have a responsibility to guard against damage to life-supporting microbiomes.
Actions: how we go about identifying important microbiomes, the factors that support or harm them, and how to act on societal levels to ensure continued maintenance of important microbiomes.