World soil day 2024: why we urgently need to stop treating soils like dirt and agroecology like a niche

In 2013, the UN General Assembly declared December 5th as the World Soil Day to observe every year. This year, we celebrate the World Soil Day with the theme of “Caring for Soils: Measure, Monitor and Manage”, which underscores the importance of soil data and information to understand, advocate, make decisions and sustainably manage soil resources for sustaining life, livelihoods and nature.

Soils are limited natural resources. They are considered renewable because they are constantly forming. Though this is true, their formation occurs at extremely slow rates. In fact, one inch of topsoil can take several hundred years or more to develop. In optimum conditions and a mild climate, it takes between 200-400 years to form 1cm of new soil.

Soil and land are the foundation of agriculture, biodiversity, sustainable livelihood systems, as healthy soils are the basis for food, nutrition, shelter, income and economy. Healthy soil directly contributes towards achieving eight Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), such as Zero Hunger (SDG 2), Climate Action (SDG 13) and Life on Land (SDG 15), while indirectly influencing additional five goals, including Good Health and Well-being (SDG 3). Hence, soil is central to the global challenges which the people and nature are facing and struggling to find solutions these days.

However, it is a matter of extreme concern that there is a rapid decline in soil quality throughout the world due to changes in physical, chemical and biological features. UNESCO (2024) reports that approximately 75% of the world’s land is degraded, with projections of rising to 90% by 2050, directly impacting 3.2 billion people. When land is degraded, it impacts food security, water availability and ecosystem health, directly affecting half of humanity, and causing a loss of about US$40 trillion worth of ecosystem services each year — nearly half of the global GDP of $93 trillion in 2021. Land degradation is also considered “the single greatest cause of terrestrial biodiversity loss,” and considerably contributes to climate change: Between 2000 and 2009, annual greenhouse gas emissions from degraded land accounted for up to 4.4 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.