By Anders Lorenzen

The impacts of climate change, such as droughts, intensive and large-scale industrial farming, land degradation, chemical overuse and surging demand for meat to be farmed are combined reasons for the declining health and quality of the soil the world over. If serious and urgent action is not taken, it will speed up desertification and the world’s agricultural land’s ability to produce the level of food it is today.

The world is losing billions of topsoil annually due to overgrazing, deforestation, pollution as well as many other issues. 

Addressing the root causes

There’s little knowledge of the importance and crucial role soil plays in the world’s ecosystems, as well as supporting the vast majority of the food humanity consumes it also acts as a giant carbon sink and is home to nearly 60% of the planet’s species. 

According to the Deputy Director of the Ecosystems Division at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Bruno Pozzi, to reverse this declining trend, we need to get serious about soil degradation, “By addressing the root causes of soil degradation, we can restore soil health and create a more sustainable future for hundreds of millions of people.” 

Role of climate change

Over one-third of the world’s population lives in water scarcity areas. When land degrades, it loses its ability to retain water, which leads to vegetation loss and creates a vicious cycle of drought and erosion. This is then exacerbated by climate change.

Clearing land

Human activity such as deforestation clearing forests, peatlands and grasslands to make land for more intensive farming with large-scale chemically focused agriculture, while in the short term could increase yields, in the long-term picture it will do the opposite and reduce yield and threaten food security.

Impacts of industrial farming

Intense agriculture also leaves farming land unable to respond to climate-fuelled extreme weather events for instance with overgrazing when extreme rainfall occurs there’s nothing to soak up the water and everything is washed away along with topsoil and its essential nutrients and chemicals used as fertiliser and pesticides and ends up in water systems and polluting them.

Solutions for soil restoration

Experts agree that the world has to change the way they farm, this would involve less intensive methods, fewer chemicals including more nature in farm systems, as well as nature-based methods such as adding natural compost and organic materials to the soil, incorporating natural irrigation solutions and restore soil by crop rotation and conservation, by alternating what part of the soil is to be productive is not the same part year after year and you regenerate it by conservation efforts.

Growing balance

And fundamentally there should be a global balance of what we grow, how we grow it and why we grow it. For instance, due to the land-intensive nature of animal agriculture, a larger focus should be on plants as hectares provide a lot more protein than animal products. 

Anders Lorenzen is the founding Editor of A greener life, a greener world.