Healthy Soil for a Healthy Planet: Building Resilient Food Systems from the Ground Up

By Leigh Winowiecki, Soil and Land Health Leader, CIFOR-ICRAF and Martina Fleckenstein, Global Policy Lead, Food, WWF

Protecting and restoring nature is essential to tackling both the climate and food security crises. To most people, this means improving and increasing numbers and types of plants and animals, but a fundamental factor is often forgotten: our soil. The world is at a crossroads, with about one-third of the Earth’s surface degraded, negatively impacting 3.2 billion people. A fundamental change is required to help improve our soil and ecosystem health — and by doing so, we can start to build a nature-positive, food secure future with net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.

The recently released second edition of the Global Land Outlook states that “land restoration is essential and urgently needed” and that while agriculture is currently the primary cause of degradation, it can become the principal catalyst for restoration. Soil health is the foundation of our food systems and provides several vital ecosystem services, including agricultural productivity, flood regulation, nutrient cycling, and carbon sequestration. The concept of soil health includes biological, physical and chemical aspects of soil ecosystems.

Despite the wealth of benefits that existing soil-focused initiatives have delivered, degradation is a constant factor from unsustainable land management practices leading to soil erosion, salinization, compaction, acidification and chemical pollution. Fertile topsoil is lost at a rate of 24bn tonnes per year due to the harmful practices of unsustainable management.

Momentum and the path forward

Earlier this year, agriculture ministers agreed at the Global Forum for Food and Agriculture to enhance soil organic carbon, soil health and soil conservation, and to strive to achieve a land degradation-neutral world by 2030. This week, the 15th United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification Conference of the Parties (UNCCD COP15) is taking place in Cote D’Ivoire. The COP15 theme, ‘Land. Life. Legacy: From scarcity to prosperity’, is a call to action to ensure land, the lifeline on this planet, continues to benefit present and future generations. This year, focus areas include Food, Land Restoration, the Great Green Wall, Drought and Science. The thread across these topics is soil management and its critical role in realising national commitments on ecosystem restoration, climate action and food and nutrition security goals. It is essential that the momentum from the Global Forum for Food and Agriculture is maintained at COP15.

A key vehicle for maintaining momentum is the Coalition of Action 4 Soil Health (CA4SH), launched at the UN Food Systems Summit last year. CA4SH aims to improve soil health globally by addressing critical implementation, monitoring, policy, and public and private investment barriers that constrain farmers and landowner from adopting and scaling healthy soil practices such as regenerative and agroecologocial approaches.

Key targets for the Coalition are to integrate soil health in policy, expand research into soil health practices, monitoring and financial tools and mechanisms, increase the number of hectares under healthy soil practices and increase financial investments in soil health by 5–10 fold. Key to this will be employing a farmer-centered approach to ensure access to transparent and equitable solutions. CA4SH works through regional and country hubs to build synergies across existing and new initiatives to develop multi-stakeholder partnerships and actions, market-based solutions, enabling environments and consistent and robust monitoring processes.

At COP15, CA4SH is bringing together diverse stakeholders from science, policy, development, conservation and the private sector, through several events to garner support to combat desertification by scaling investments in soil health. The final agreements coming out of COP15 need to include specific commitments on soil health and advancing the science of soil health monitoring. A general consensus must be taken to realise the importance of how the protection and preservation of soil health is directly linked to our food production systems, air quality, forests, biodiversity and more.

Moving forward from COP15, a stronger alignment of global commitments is urgently required to protect and foster healthy soil. Land Degradation Neutrality commitments, the Global Biodiversity Framework and Nationally Determined Contributions to the Paris Climate Agreement need to better consider and reflect the need to enhance soil health and soil organic carbon. Better coordination across the three Rio Conventions will help achieve a nature-positive, climate-resilient, food secure world by 2030.

Our soil is the very basis of human, animal and plant existence, to protect and preserve it will help us protect this planet for future generations.