Far from being merely ‘dirt’, soil plays a fundamental role in food production, water availability and biodiversity. A new research programme aims to safeguard its future sustainable management.
Far from being merely ‘dirt’, soil plays a fundamental role in food production, water availability and biodiversity. A new research programme aims to safeguard its future sustainable management.
Given the demands made on soil, it can’t look after itself.
Put simply, we cannot survive without soil. Its rich combination of minerals, carbon-rich organic matter and water supports plant life. It also harbours its own diverse ecosystem of millions of microbes and fauna that aerate the soil, cycle nutrients, decompose dead matter and mineralise rock fragments around them.
And although forests might most readily spring to mind when considering the role of the natural environment in carbon exchange, what may not be so obvious is the vast carbon sink under our very feet. In fact, more carbon is stored in soil worldwide than is found in the atmosphere and the planet’s biomass put together.
Yet this fundamental resource is under threat from intensive agricultural practices and erosion. The catastrophe of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, when a combination of severe drought and intensive farming caused dust storms across the American prairies, shows the extent to which major damage can be inflicted.
Now, a major programme with €7 million funding from the European Commission will help to define a policy for sustainable management of soils, with a view to adopting a legally binding Soil Framework Directive, such as exists for air and water.
The Ecological Function and Biodiversity Indicators in European Soils (EcoFINDERS) programme, which launched in January 2011, brings together 22 institutional European research partners, including the University of Cambridge, to formulate how best to manage the health of soil.
Soil value
Given the demands made on soil, it can’t look after itself. The goal of EcoFINDERS is to design and implement soil strategies aimed at ensuring the sustainable use of soils, as Dr Unai Pascual, who leads the Cambridge component of the programme, explained: “The general hypothesis is that changes in the diversity of microbes and fauna in soil indicate how healthy it is. EcoFINDERS is therefore characterising soil biodiversity and determining how this links with soil functions and ecosystem services.”
“Our contribution to the programme is focused on working out the value of the soil ecosystem services: essentially, how much does soil matter when you take into account all of the functions it performs?” added Dr Pascual. “Our task is to design cost-effective and socially fair policy instruments for the conservation of soil biodiversity.”
In effect, soil provides such a vast array of essential ecosystem services that maintaining its health has implications for food production, water availability, climate-induced environmental change, resistance to diseases and pests, and the regulation of its own and above-ground biodiversity.
Dr Pascual believes that understanding the value of soil biodiversity conservation in relation to its function to deliver key ecosystem services that support human wellbeing will open up a whole new way of looking at soil and land management in Europe and elsewhere, especially in the context of current global challenges such as food security and climate change.
For more information, please contact Dr Unai Pascual (up211@cam.ac.uk) at the Department of Land Economy or visit www.ecofinders.eu/
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Food security, biodiversity and soil carbon
How can incentives for soil carbon contribute to food security and biodiversity conservation ? This key question was explored recently at a Cambridge Conservation Initiative (CCI) collaborative workshop led by the UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre (WCMC) and the University’s Departments of Plant Sciences and Land Economy. “While incentive measures that encourage maintenance of forest carbon are well developed, those for soil carbon management are less so,” explained Alison Rosser of the UNEP-WCMC Biodiversity, Biomass and Food Security Programme. “The workshop proceedings will aid development of a policy brief for decision makers as to how we might address this as a global priority. The importance of maintaining soil carbon cannot be overstressed, both for the widespread benefits it brings to producing food and conserving biodiversity, and for its role as a carbon sink,” added Dr Ed Tanner of Plant Sciences. The workshop was funded by the CCI Strategic Initiative Fund and highlighted the unique capabilities of partners in CCI and other experts to review the opportunities and challenges for biodiversity and food supply.
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