Enjeux

The main goal of SOILGUARD is to deliver evidence-based knowledge regarding SSM benefits for soil biodiversity and its potential to deliver ES across biomes and biogeographical regions under specific stressors derived from climate change. This knowledge will be used to produce recommendations on soil management, policy and conservation frameworks for the global soil assessment and raise awareness among decision and policy makers, encouraging the development of region-specific strategies to conserve soil biodiversity and avoid land degradation.

Contexte Scientifique

The negative impacts of unsustainable management and climate change, on soils and their biodiversity are jeopardizing the achievement of the Aichi Biodiversity Targets and compromising the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the EU 2030 biodiversity strategy, the 2050 vision for biodiversity, and ultimately the planet’s life-support systems. Negative impacts on soil biodiversity are threatening soil multifunctionality, defined as the capacity of soils to simultaneously provide multiple ecosystem functions and services, considering interactions and trade-offs between functions. Particularly worrying are the threats to those soil functions and services related to food and fibre production, water quality and atmospheric greenhouse gas composition. Given the severity of these issues, the IPBES claims for an urgent need to adopt sustainable soil management (SSM) policies and practices to minimize current, and avoid future, land degradation. As described in the Voluntary Guidelines for Sustainable Soil Management, 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. However, it is an arduous task to transmit this sense of urgency to decision and policy makers due to the existence of major knowledge gaps: i) information on the current status of species distributions, population trends and challenges to soil biodiversity, especially at larger scales and across biomes, is largely unknown, ii) the intrinsic mechanisms through which soil biodiversity (from viruses, bacteria and fungi to insects and earthworms) delivers ecosystem services (ES) are far from being understood and iii) the role of soil biodiversity and the ways in which the delivery of ES changes in response to soil management and climate stressors (soil degradation or climate change effects) are not clear. Only a significant increase in our understanding of the correlations between land degradation, soil management, soil biodiversity status and multifunctionality, across biomes, will allow to quantify the environmental, economic and social impacts and costs of maintaining current unsustainable agricultural and forestry practices under the progressive increase in severity of climate change