November 1, 2013

Healthy Soils for Healthy Landscapes

What goes on below the ground in a landscape is just as significant as the vegetation and crops above. Particularly in relation to climate change, the state of a landscape’s soil can not only affect how much carbon is stored both below and above ground, but also the system’s ability to adapt to future climatic changes (e.g. withstanding drought events). This week happened to mark the 2nd Global Soil Week, which aims for international and interdisciplinary thinking around soil management. This year’s theme of “Losing Ground?” focused on four threads that have considerable relevance for integrated landscape management:

  1. Material Cycles, and how humans are increasingly transforming the cycles of such materials as carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, water, through soil and land-use management practices.
  2. Sustainable Land Management and Soil Engineering, in particular looking for insights on how to scale up such management to a landscape level, and what can be learnt from examples of integrated management already in place.
  3. International Soil Policy and Sustainable Development Goals, considering the role of such international efforts as the Sustainable Development Goals, and how to integrate the local and international levels.
  4. Responsible Land Governance, and the social mechanisms needed for adoption of principles and guidelines for responsible governance.

As part of a month-long thematic focus on Restoring Landscapes, the Agriculture and Ecosystems Blog addressed several of these key threads with a post on the work of Maurizio Guadagni from the World Bank on the Bridging Agriculture and Conservation initiative. Conservation agriculture, specifically no-till methods of cultivation, is one avenue for soils to both contribute carbon sequestration services and maintain healthier, more profitable agroecosystems. For small-scale farmers, adopting these methods often requires a cooperative model, to deal with some of the capital-intensive mechanised equipment needs. And enabling such shifts at farm and the broader landscape scales will require collaboration across agriculture and environment institutions, one of the goals of the new Initiative.

Read More:
Food Security Starts from the Ground Up – Maurizio Guadagni, Agriculture and Ecosystems Blog

Photo credit: USDA NRCS Soil Health
More In in Staying Current

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  • shrikant
    November 2, 2013 at 2:12am

    The two most important natural resourses are soil and water which a vital parts of our life support system. The soil can be kept healthy by nature itself but the main destrcture in human who for his selfish goals destroyed both the soil and water over the years. It is our prime duty to put the soil back to its position so that the teaming millions can be fed.