Showcasing the connections between human well-being and the soil.

Soils are fundamental to life on Earth but human pressures on soil resourcesare reaching critical limits. Further loss of productive soils will amplify food-price volatility and potentially send millions of people into poverty. This loss is avoidable. Careful soil management can increase the food supply, and provides a valuable lever for climate regulation and a pathway for safeguarding ecosystem services. Achieving sustainable management of soil resources will generate large benefits for all communities and nations. In some parts of the world it will be a key to economic prosperity and in others it will even be important for their national security in the short to medium-term. Whatever the context, effective policy based on sound evidence is essential for a good outcome. 

The consideration of soil in policy formulation has been weak in most parts of the world. Reasons include the following: 

• lack of ready access to the evidence needed for policy action

 • the challenge of dealing with property rights for a natural resource that is often privately owned and at the same time an important public good

 • the long-time scales involved in soil change – some of the most important changes take place over decades and they can be difficult to detect. 

As a result, communities and institutions may not respond until critical and irreversible thresholds have been exceeded. Perhaps even more significant for policy makers is the disconnection between our increasingly urbanized human societies and the soil. The proportion of human labor devoted to working the soil has steadily decreased through the past century, and hence the experience of direct contact with the soil has lessened in most regions. Soil is very different in this regard than food, energy, water and air, to which each of us requires constant and secure access. Yet human society as a whole depends more than ever before on products from the soil as well as on the more intangible services it provides for maintenance of the biosphere.

Our goal in the Status of the World’s Soil Resources report is to make clear these essential connections between human well-being and the soil, and to provide a benchmark against which our collective progress to conserve this essential resource can be measured. This report provides a summary of the major findings of the full report. References are made to the main report in the form of footnotes. For reasons of readability the text from the main report is not always quoted as per original text. The report does not presume to be prescriptive. Instead, it aims to provide the necessary global context and a preliminary structure for developing enduring and effective policy responses at the national and regional level. Sustainable soil management (SSM) is a key foundational concept of this report.

 The definition of SSM used through this document is drawn directly from the2015 World Soil Charter: Soil management is sustainable if the supporting, provisioning, regulating, and cultural services provided by soil are maintained or enhanced without significantly impairing either the soil functions that enable those services or biodiversity. This report focuses on ten threats to soil functions: soil erosion, SOC loss, nutrient imbalance, soil acidification, soil contamination, waterlogging, soil compaction, soil sealing, salinization, and loss of soil biodiversity.