- Email: [email protected]
Land Users
One Earth
Voices Land Users It is clear that we must revolutionize the way in which we use land if we are to successfully meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals and Paris Agreement temperature targets and avoid potentially irreversible damage to planetary systems. This Voices asks: what are the pressing needs and viable solutions? Include, Integrate, and Incentivize
The Land Crunch
Urban Planning to Combat Sprawl
Izabella Koziell
Tim Benton
Anna Hersperger
CGIAR Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems
Energy, Environment and Resources, Chatham House
Land-Use Systems Group, Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research
We’re witnessing a growing impetus for action on climate and environment. It’s driven by the realization that decades of effort have fallen short and that we have both a climate crisis and a full-blown planetary emergency! Radical solutions are gaining traction, but they can bring new risks that hamper progress. Well-meaning solutions, such as boycotting unsustainable agricultural products, do not consider impacts on some of the world’s poorest groups. Others focus on single problems and neglect interlinkages, for instance, the demand for biofuels takes land away from food production. Any truly sustainable vision for land-use change must integrate an understanding of the necessary trade-offs and must not overlook economic and social sustainability, as economic growth neglected the environment. It is difficult to develop land-use solutions that satisfy the diverse needs of environmental sustainability, food security, social equity, and economic needs. There are glimmers of hope—for instance, CGIAR’s solar-irrigation innovations deliver an alternative to carbon-inefficient diesel pumps while providing financial incentives to farmers to prevent over-pumping of water and delivering returns to governments. The key barrier to sustainability is the lack of such integrated incentive-based solutions, as well as the policy and institutional inertia that prevents such techniques from being scaled up. Local solutions are important, but transformation of broader structures is absolutely necessary to make the jump from localized short-term interventions to systemic change.
Land is needed for food, feed, and fiber production, for settlements and transport infrastructure, for biodiversity, for cultural landscapes, and increasingly for storing carbon. But whereas land is finite, the demand for the goods and services from land might not be. Each of these services is important, but the demand for them collectively will soon exceed the ability to supply. Take, for example, the need for land for ‘‘negative emissions’’ to mitigate climate change through storing carbon in biomass. On current projections, in order to live with an equitable climate, we might need land equivalent to 2.5 times the size of India to grow said biomass. At the same time, people are demanding more food, with ever bigger resource footprints, at a price cheap enough to allow food to be thrown away and us to overeat to the detriment of our health. Clearly the future is partly about using the land to its best ability to grow the right thing in the right place and partly making our systems more efficient (so we don’t use land to grow food to throw away or make us ill). But if there is more demand for products from land than supply, what then? Land might necessarily become the strategically important asset of the 21st century, as oil was in the 20th. In a world moving away from international rule-based cooperation, will competition for land between states drive cooperation or conflict? Watch this space ..
Cities and urban regions are among the most dynamic land-use systems in the world. Almost everywhere, urban land is rapidly expanding from centers to rural areas in association with far-reaching economic and social changes. This growth is leading to an unprecedented increase in sealed areas and sprawl, which has had many negative impacts on biodiversity, urban climate, and the water cycle, among others. Urban planning is a multi-faceted activity with extensive experience in the management of urbanization processes. Its key strategies include the development of compact and green cities. Urban renewal, multifunctional land uses, high urban density in terms of jobs and residents, and urbangrowth boundaries and green belts are important measures for implementing these policies and preventing urban sprawl. However, because today’s urban expansion differs in scope and quality from previous urbanization processes, radically new planning approaches are needed. When developing viable solutions for combating sprawl, futureoriented planning processes and instruments must take into account that power, legitimacy, and financing are at the forefront. This requires that planning actors successfully navigate complex political and technical aspects of the plan-making and plan-implementation processes. In addition, urban-planning practice is urged to grow with the changing needs of individuals and communities as well as with altering environmental conditions. From the location to the regional level, this requires the redesign of urban planning as an adaptive process.
One Earth 1, October 25, 2019 ª 2019 Published by Elsevier Inc. 151
One Earth
Voices Do We Fly, or Do We Eat?
Can We Achieve Human, Animal, and Planetary Health?
The Role of Soils in Our Future
Dave Reay
Jessica Fanzo
Peter Smith
Carbon Management, School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh
Global Food Ethics and Policy Program, John Hopkins University
University of Aberdeen
Finite. That’s the reality of land and the gifts it bestows upon us. Whether it’s our food, clothes, or homes, land is the literal and metaphorical bedrock of civilization. For 10,000 years we have bent it to our will, cleared forests, ground mountains to dust, and reshaped coastlines. Today, human use directly affects more than two-thirds of the ice-free land surface on Earth. Population is set to rise to over 9 billion this century. Even in isolation, handling this extra pressure on land would be hard to square with the myriad other demands it must meet. But then there is climate change. Climate change already threatens yields through drought and flood, heat, and disease. To limit global heating, we can’t simply cut emissions; we must also sequester more carbon. And that needs yet more land. The theory goes that by enhancing forest and soil carbon, we could balance so-called ‘‘unavoidable emissions’’ to achieve ‘‘net zero.’’ In a finite world, this means big trade-offs. There are real dangers that cutting carbon through land use comes at the cost of livelihoods and communities, biodiversity, and ecosystem health. We need well-integrated rural policy applied within local contexts to dodge the worst pitfalls that can come with ‘‘carbon blinkers.’’ As we strive for a net-zero future, the land can be a great ally. But if we fail to cut fossil fuel burning, then no amount of integrated land-use assessment and stakeholder engagement will balance the books. If we get this wrong, the question will not be ‘‘should we have trees here instead of sheep?’’ It will be ‘‘do we fly, or do we eat?’’
The landscapes used to grow our food are not being used efficiently for the types of diets the world should be eating. Whereas smallholder farmers are still conserving the biodiversity, and thus the diversity, of our lands, agriculture is pushing more toward monocropping to a fewer numbers of crops for both our own food and feed for animals. This increases risks for adapting to climate change and meeting the nutritional needs of our growing population. It is time to think about what we grow and how we grow it and envision the sorts of diets our world wants to eat. What if we could have it all—human, animal, and planetary health? I think we can. But we must get the agriculture composition right. We must diversify to fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, and seeds and ensure that if we do feed animals, they are fed more sustainable feed that doesn’t require acres of land. We must be innovative about how to use the land that we have and not expand or burn precious forest containing rich biodiversity. We must not pillage the oceans and rather find new aquaculture technologies that are sustainable and safe. It is all possible if governments step up and reshape food systems in directions that have better benefits for diets and the environment. If we achieve both of those, we will also see economic returns.
We treat our soils like dirt. Before mineral fertilizers, the only way to preserve the productivity of our agricultural land was to maintain soil fertility by maintaining soil organic-matter levels by returning organic materials to the soils. For over 100 years we have largely been able to bypass that need for soil health by using mineral fertilizers to replace nutrients not being provided by the soils. Although mineral fertilizers have been invaluable in helping us to feed the world, the need to look after our soils has been negated. This has led to poor soil management and a loss of fertility and other environmental problems, including water and air pollution, soil erosion, and other forms of land degradation, such as soil salinization and acidification. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization concluded in 2015 that the majority of the world’s soil resources are in only fair, poor, or very poor condition—over half of the world’s soils are in need of urgent restoration. Soils directly underpin almost all ecosystem services, particularly the supporting, regulating, and provisioning services, as well as many of the cultural services delivered by nature. Healthy soils are central to delivering the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); of the 17 SDGs, only five are not directly affected by soils. Soils will be critical to creating carbon sinks to tackle climate change, to underpinning future food, fiber, and energy provision, and to controlling environmental pollution. We need to factor healthy soils into our every consideration of how to deliver a healthy future for the planet.
152 One Earth 1, October 25, 2019
One Earth
Voices Playing It Safe Is No Longer an Option
Land, a Nexus for Sustainability Transformations
Food Solutions Require a Landscape Approach
Frances Seymour
Ariane de Bremond
Marcela Quintero
World Resource Institute
Centre for Development University of Bern
The recent UN Climate Action Summit exposed a yawning gap between the reality of tropical deforestation and what the international community is doing about it. The summit marked the fifth anniversary of the 2014 New York Declaration on Forests, when a coalition of governments, companies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and indigenous peoples committed to ten goals, including halving deforestation by 2020 and eliminating it by 2030. An assessment of progress shows little to celebrate. Satellites reveal the relentless upward trajectory of tree-cover loss. Photographers capture images of raging fires as landscapes are transformed to geometric monocultures tied to international markets and finance. Reports from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change detail the severe risks that continued land-use change poses to vulnerable ecosystems and people. Although the summit produced a few new commitments of funding and partnerships, they are far too modest to match the scale of the problem. When a house is on fire, inhabitants are willing to risk jumping out of a window rather than stay inside to face certain death. Our Earth is on fire; it’s time to start taking other kinds of risks. Frontline environmental defenders are already risking their lives. Diplomats can risk offending governments complicit in deforestation. Companies can risk cutting off irresponsible producers. Donors can risk placing big bets on REDD+. NGOs can risk engaging with polluters to explore a limited role for offsets. Playing it safe is no longer an option when the risk of no action is so devastating.
Land is at the nexus of crucial societal and environmental challenges and provides the bridge between individual sustainable development goals—decisions on land use can serve as the very pathways through which the well-being of humans and nature can be secured. Over three-quarters of Earth’s land surface is used for the needs of people: agriculture, forestry, and settlements that support increasingly complex global supply chains. This complexity is compounded by diverse stakeholders—each with different values and management aims— making land governance a wicked problem. Solutions can often yield additional problems: inherent trade-offs between producers, conservation, and other uses lead to losers as well as winners. It is critical to move beyond territorial approaches and instead better manage globalized flows of land-based resources and address power asymmetries between actors and across scales and locations. For example, promising initiatives such as Trase are improving transparency and governance of international supply chains and supporting companies to monitor and manage deforestation and restore forests. Improved understanding of complex landsystem dynamics and their governance is essential. Land-system science initiatives such as the Global Land Programme of Future Earth seek to achieve this by using transdisciplinary methods that include local, lay, and indigenous knowledge to support transformations toward a sustainable future. Sharing the planet fairly with each other and nature is a collective challenge that demands new approaches, new tools, and a new level of societal engagement.
and
Environment,
International Center for Tropical Agriculture
Apart from the need to meet growing food demands, the world is demanding more diverse, healthy, and nutritious food with lower environmental impact and more resilience to external shocks. This is far more ambitious than the Green Revolution, when the focus was only on yields. Although this challenge is acknowledged, agricultural solutions to fulfill multiple objectives are not adopted widely. There are great examples of solutions under the so-called sustainable intensification of agriculture, climate-smart agriculture, sustainable agriculture, and more recent regenerative agriculture concepts. Yet, when reviewed, these examples share remarkable similarities: conservation tillage, agroforestry, silvopastoral systems, and rotational systems, for example. It would appear that we scientists spend more time on creating new terms for the same things and less on how to catalyze a system where such solutions can be widely adopted. Solutions are needed urgently and at scale. This leads to temptations to propose ‘‘silver-bullet’’ solutions that reach millions of people. Despite this, a growing critical mass of scientists are recognizing the need to transform landscapes instead of plots. Applied research shows us that such a landscape approach could work if we identify interventions that trigger systemwide improvements (which requires knowledge of locally specific socioecological conditions), facilitate processes for the co-design of solutions between scientists and practitioners, negotiate to agree on the environmental and socioeconomic trade-offs resulting from different landscape arrangements, and focus on not only technological innovations but also institutional ones.
One Earth 1, October 25, 2019 153
One Earth
Voices Recarbonization of Global Soils
Ronald Vargas Food and Agricultural Organisation
Today there is pressure from different sectors, particularly youth and environmentalists, to take bold action against climate change and to create a better future for all. Although science has demonstrated numerous good practices to address the climate challenge, identifying those practices that are most cost effective and devoid of uncertainty remains an issue. One cost-effective option constitutes soil organic carbon sequestration—when in an optimal, healthy state, soils naturally store more carbon than the sum of that contained in both the atmosphere and vegetation. A healthy soil not only prevents greenhouse gases emissions but also provides co-benefits such as enhancing food security and farm income, reducing poverty and malnutrition, providing essential ecosystem services, contributing to sustainable development, and building resilience to shocks. The world’s cultivated soils have lost 20%–70% of their original carbon stock to the atmosphere in the form of CO2. Agriculture intensification and associated soil degradation have considerably reduced soil productivity, prevented the provision of goods and services, and led to huge economic losses. The recarbonization of global soils offers a hidden nature-based ally in our efforts to decarbonize our economy and sequester carbon and protect existing carbon sinks. It offers an affordable, real, and cost-effective contribution to the fight against climate change while generating further benefits for all.
154 One Earth 1, October 25, 2019
Voices Land Users It is clear that we must revolutionize the way in which we use land if we are to successfully meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals and Paris Agreement temperature targets and avoid potentially irreversible damage to planetary systems. This Voices asks: what are the pressing needs and viable solutions? Include, Integrate, and Incentivize
The Land Crunch
Urban Planning to Combat Sprawl
Izabella Koziell
Tim Benton
Anna Hersperger
CGIAR Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems
Energy, Environment and Resources, Chatham House
Land-Use Systems Group, Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research
We’re witnessing a growing impetus for action on climate and environment. It’s driven by the realization that decades of effort have fallen short and that we have both a climate crisis and a full-blown planetary emergency! Radical solutions are gaining traction, but they can bring new risks that hamper progress. Well-meaning solutions, such as boycotting unsustainable agricultural products, do not consider impacts on some of the world’s poorest groups. Others focus on single problems and neglect interlinkages, for instance, the demand for biofuels takes land away from food production. Any truly sustainable vision for land-use change must integrate an understanding of the necessary trade-offs and must not overlook economic and social sustainability, as economic growth neglected the environment. It is difficult to develop land-use solutions that satisfy the diverse needs of environmental sustainability, food security, social equity, and economic needs. There are glimmers of hope—for instance, CGIAR’s solar-irrigation innovations deliver an alternative to carbon-inefficient diesel pumps while providing financial incentives to farmers to prevent over-pumping of water and delivering returns to governments. The key barrier to sustainability is the lack of such integrated incentive-based solutions, as well as the policy and institutional inertia that prevents such techniques from being scaled up. Local solutions are important, but transformation of broader structures is absolutely necessary to make the jump from localized short-term interventions to systemic change.
Land is needed for food, feed, and fiber production, for settlements and transport infrastructure, for biodiversity, for cultural landscapes, and increasingly for storing carbon. But whereas land is finite, the demand for the goods and services from land might not be. Each of these services is important, but the demand for them collectively will soon exceed the ability to supply. Take, for example, the need for land for ‘‘negative emissions’’ to mitigate climate change through storing carbon in biomass. On current projections, in order to live with an equitable climate, we might need land equivalent to 2.5 times the size of India to grow said biomass. At the same time, people are demanding more food, with ever bigger resource footprints, at a price cheap enough to allow food to be thrown away and us to overeat to the detriment of our health. Clearly the future is partly about using the land to its best ability to grow the right thing in the right place and partly making our systems more efficient (so we don’t use land to grow food to throw away or make us ill). But if there is more demand for products from land than supply, what then? Land might necessarily become the strategically important asset of the 21st century, as oil was in the 20th. In a world moving away from international rule-based cooperation, will competition for land between states drive cooperation or conflict? Watch this space ..
Cities and urban regions are among the most dynamic land-use systems in the world. Almost everywhere, urban land is rapidly expanding from centers to rural areas in association with far-reaching economic and social changes. This growth is leading to an unprecedented increase in sealed areas and sprawl, which has had many negative impacts on biodiversity, urban climate, and the water cycle, among others. Urban planning is a multi-faceted activity with extensive experience in the management of urbanization processes. Its key strategies include the development of compact and green cities. Urban renewal, multifunctional land uses, high urban density in terms of jobs and residents, and urbangrowth boundaries and green belts are important measures for implementing these policies and preventing urban sprawl. However, because today’s urban expansion differs in scope and quality from previous urbanization processes, radically new planning approaches are needed. When developing viable solutions for combating sprawl, futureoriented planning processes and instruments must take into account that power, legitimacy, and financing are at the forefront. This requires that planning actors successfully navigate complex political and technical aspects of the plan-making and plan-implementation processes. In addition, urban-planning practice is urged to grow with the changing needs of individuals and communities as well as with altering environmental conditions. From the location to the regional level, this requires the redesign of urban planning as an adaptive process.
One Earth 1, October 25, 2019 ª 2019 Published by Elsevier Inc. 151
One Earth
Voices Do We Fly, or Do We Eat?
Can We Achieve Human, Animal, and Planetary Health?
The Role of Soils in Our Future
Dave Reay
Jessica Fanzo
Peter Smith
Carbon Management, School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh
Global Food Ethics and Policy Program, John Hopkins University
University of Aberdeen
Finite. That’s the reality of land and the gifts it bestows upon us. Whether it’s our food, clothes, or homes, land is the literal and metaphorical bedrock of civilization. For 10,000 years we have bent it to our will, cleared forests, ground mountains to dust, and reshaped coastlines. Today, human use directly affects more than two-thirds of the ice-free land surface on Earth. Population is set to rise to over 9 billion this century. Even in isolation, handling this extra pressure on land would be hard to square with the myriad other demands it must meet. But then there is climate change. Climate change already threatens yields through drought and flood, heat, and disease. To limit global heating, we can’t simply cut emissions; we must also sequester more carbon. And that needs yet more land. The theory goes that by enhancing forest and soil carbon, we could balance so-called ‘‘unavoidable emissions’’ to achieve ‘‘net zero.’’ In a finite world, this means big trade-offs. There are real dangers that cutting carbon through land use comes at the cost of livelihoods and communities, biodiversity, and ecosystem health. We need well-integrated rural policy applied within local contexts to dodge the worst pitfalls that can come with ‘‘carbon blinkers.’’ As we strive for a net-zero future, the land can be a great ally. But if we fail to cut fossil fuel burning, then no amount of integrated land-use assessment and stakeholder engagement will balance the books. If we get this wrong, the question will not be ‘‘should we have trees here instead of sheep?’’ It will be ‘‘do we fly, or do we eat?’’
The landscapes used to grow our food are not being used efficiently for the types of diets the world should be eating. Whereas smallholder farmers are still conserving the biodiversity, and thus the diversity, of our lands, agriculture is pushing more toward monocropping to a fewer numbers of crops for both our own food and feed for animals. This increases risks for adapting to climate change and meeting the nutritional needs of our growing population. It is time to think about what we grow and how we grow it and envision the sorts of diets our world wants to eat. What if we could have it all—human, animal, and planetary health? I think we can. But we must get the agriculture composition right. We must diversify to fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, and seeds and ensure that if we do feed animals, they are fed more sustainable feed that doesn’t require acres of land. We must be innovative about how to use the land that we have and not expand or burn precious forest containing rich biodiversity. We must not pillage the oceans and rather find new aquaculture technologies that are sustainable and safe. It is all possible if governments step up and reshape food systems in directions that have better benefits for diets and the environment. If we achieve both of those, we will also see economic returns.
We treat our soils like dirt. Before mineral fertilizers, the only way to preserve the productivity of our agricultural land was to maintain soil fertility by maintaining soil organic-matter levels by returning organic materials to the soils. For over 100 years we have largely been able to bypass that need for soil health by using mineral fertilizers to replace nutrients not being provided by the soils. Although mineral fertilizers have been invaluable in helping us to feed the world, the need to look after our soils has been negated. This has led to poor soil management and a loss of fertility and other environmental problems, including water and air pollution, soil erosion, and other forms of land degradation, such as soil salinization and acidification. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization concluded in 2015 that the majority of the world’s soil resources are in only fair, poor, or very poor condition—over half of the world’s soils are in need of urgent restoration. Soils directly underpin almost all ecosystem services, particularly the supporting, regulating, and provisioning services, as well as many of the cultural services delivered by nature. Healthy soils are central to delivering the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); of the 17 SDGs, only five are not directly affected by soils. Soils will be critical to creating carbon sinks to tackle climate change, to underpinning future food, fiber, and energy provision, and to controlling environmental pollution. We need to factor healthy soils into our every consideration of how to deliver a healthy future for the planet.
152 One Earth 1, October 25, 2019
One Earth
Voices Playing It Safe Is No Longer an Option
Land, a Nexus for Sustainability Transformations
Food Solutions Require a Landscape Approach
Frances Seymour
Ariane de Bremond
Marcela Quintero
World Resource Institute
Centre for Development University of Bern
The recent UN Climate Action Summit exposed a yawning gap between the reality of tropical deforestation and what the international community is doing about it. The summit marked the fifth anniversary of the 2014 New York Declaration on Forests, when a coalition of governments, companies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and indigenous peoples committed to ten goals, including halving deforestation by 2020 and eliminating it by 2030. An assessment of progress shows little to celebrate. Satellites reveal the relentless upward trajectory of tree-cover loss. Photographers capture images of raging fires as landscapes are transformed to geometric monocultures tied to international markets and finance. Reports from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change detail the severe risks that continued land-use change poses to vulnerable ecosystems and people. Although the summit produced a few new commitments of funding and partnerships, they are far too modest to match the scale of the problem. When a house is on fire, inhabitants are willing to risk jumping out of a window rather than stay inside to face certain death. Our Earth is on fire; it’s time to start taking other kinds of risks. Frontline environmental defenders are already risking their lives. Diplomats can risk offending governments complicit in deforestation. Companies can risk cutting off irresponsible producers. Donors can risk placing big bets on REDD+. NGOs can risk engaging with polluters to explore a limited role for offsets. Playing it safe is no longer an option when the risk of no action is so devastating.
Land is at the nexus of crucial societal and environmental challenges and provides the bridge between individual sustainable development goals—decisions on land use can serve as the very pathways through which the well-being of humans and nature can be secured. Over three-quarters of Earth’s land surface is used for the needs of people: agriculture, forestry, and settlements that support increasingly complex global supply chains. This complexity is compounded by diverse stakeholders—each with different values and management aims— making land governance a wicked problem. Solutions can often yield additional problems: inherent trade-offs between producers, conservation, and other uses lead to losers as well as winners. It is critical to move beyond territorial approaches and instead better manage globalized flows of land-based resources and address power asymmetries between actors and across scales and locations. For example, promising initiatives such as Trase are improving transparency and governance of international supply chains and supporting companies to monitor and manage deforestation and restore forests. Improved understanding of complex landsystem dynamics and their governance is essential. Land-system science initiatives such as the Global Land Programme of Future Earth seek to achieve this by using transdisciplinary methods that include local, lay, and indigenous knowledge to support transformations toward a sustainable future. Sharing the planet fairly with each other and nature is a collective challenge that demands new approaches, new tools, and a new level of societal engagement.
and
Environment,
International Center for Tropical Agriculture
Apart from the need to meet growing food demands, the world is demanding more diverse, healthy, and nutritious food with lower environmental impact and more resilience to external shocks. This is far more ambitious than the Green Revolution, when the focus was only on yields. Although this challenge is acknowledged, agricultural solutions to fulfill multiple objectives are not adopted widely. There are great examples of solutions under the so-called sustainable intensification of agriculture, climate-smart agriculture, sustainable agriculture, and more recent regenerative agriculture concepts. Yet, when reviewed, these examples share remarkable similarities: conservation tillage, agroforestry, silvopastoral systems, and rotational systems, for example. It would appear that we scientists spend more time on creating new terms for the same things and less on how to catalyze a system where such solutions can be widely adopted. Solutions are needed urgently and at scale. This leads to temptations to propose ‘‘silver-bullet’’ solutions that reach millions of people. Despite this, a growing critical mass of scientists are recognizing the need to transform landscapes instead of plots. Applied research shows us that such a landscape approach could work if we identify interventions that trigger systemwide improvements (which requires knowledge of locally specific socioecological conditions), facilitate processes for the co-design of solutions between scientists and practitioners, negotiate to agree on the environmental and socioeconomic trade-offs resulting from different landscape arrangements, and focus on not only technological innovations but also institutional ones.
One Earth 1, October 25, 2019 153
One Earth
Voices Recarbonization of Global Soils
Ronald Vargas Food and Agricultural Organisation
Today there is pressure from different sectors, particularly youth and environmentalists, to take bold action against climate change and to create a better future for all. Although science has demonstrated numerous good practices to address the climate challenge, identifying those practices that are most cost effective and devoid of uncertainty remains an issue. One cost-effective option constitutes soil organic carbon sequestration—when in an optimal, healthy state, soils naturally store more carbon than the sum of that contained in both the atmosphere and vegetation. A healthy soil not only prevents greenhouse gases emissions but also provides co-benefits such as enhancing food security and farm income, reducing poverty and malnutrition, providing essential ecosystem services, contributing to sustainable development, and building resilience to shocks. The world’s cultivated soils have lost 20%–70% of their original carbon stock to the atmosphere in the form of CO2. Agriculture intensification and associated soil degradation have considerably reduced soil productivity, prevented the provision of goods and services, and led to huge economic losses. The recarbonization of global soils offers a hidden nature-based ally in our efforts to decarbonize our economy and sequester carbon and protect existing carbon sinks. It offers an affordable, real, and cost-effective contribution to the fight against climate change while generating further benefits for all.
154 One Earth 1, October 25, 2019