Soil is fundamental, fragile and finite. It impacts everything from food and health to conflict and migration. Deeper understanding of its degradation raises the significance of soil to equal that of climate change and biodiversity loss.
The Problem
We know that the quality of our soil is the key to the food we grow, the clothes we wear and the water we drink. It recycles nutrients, sequesters carbon, is fundamental to biodiversity, helps keep our ecosystems in balance and is an essential part of our general wellbeing. But, although soil represents the difference between survival and extinction for most terrestrial life,human activities have caused it harm leading to compaction, loss of structure, nutrient degradation, increasing salinity and denuding landscapes. Furthermore, the urgent need to preserve soil receives relatively little attention from governments. An unsung hero of our planet, it is fragile, infinitely important and finite.[1] Why do we treat it with such disregard?
Perhaps we just don’t notice the changes taking place under our feet. The formation of soil is a very slow process. Creating one millimetre of coverage can take anything from a few years to an entire millennium. Also, perhaps we don’t know enough about soil to really understand its true role. It is incredibly complex. In a mere teaspoon, there arearound a billion bacteria from several thousand different species, a million other single cell organisms, a millionindividual fungi and hundreds of “larger” animals such as microscopic worms and insects.[2] Analysing and identifyingsoil microbes is challenging. Currently less than 5% can be isolated and captured through conventional microbiology. Although we know that they influence crop growth, can potentially increase yields and that groups of microbes cando things that individual bugs cannot manage alone, we just haven’t worked out quite how they do it yet.
What we do know is that around 95% of the food we eat comes from the soil; around a quarter of all known species on Earth callsoil their home and it is able to store one and a half Olympic swimming pools full of water per hectare so is key to the prevention of flooding and mitigation of drought. Soil, particularly peat, is also an active store for carbon.[3] Indeed, in the UK, peatlands represent the single most important terrestrial carbon store holding at least 3.2 billion tonnes. Some argue, to protect them from long-term damage, ongoing farming on peat soils such as fenlands, should stop completely.[4]
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