Soil health and climate change

Soil health underpins ecosystem services like food security and therefore underpins human health. Poor soil health is a global problem which is hindering attempts to deliver the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. We focus on goals 3 (human health), 13 (climate change) which are intimately linked to goal 15 (soil health). Soil health is arguably most fragile in regions such as sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) where aged soils are characterised by poor nutrient and water holding capacity, and are largely deficient in micronutrients such as Zinc. Poor soil health coupled with the largely cereal-based diets can mean that micronutrient malnutrition is high in the region. In sub-Saharan Africa, where much of the population is too poor to purchase mineral supplements, poor soil health (SDG15) can therefore negatively impact on human health (SDG3). We surveyed 3661 school children aged 13–15 in three African countries, Ghana, South Africa and Zimbabwe, for their ‘Attitudes, Behaviours and Competencies’ of soil, which we termed ‘ABC’. The ‘ABC’ survey results showed significant soil illiteracy. The survey showed that although students were generally equipped with a good attitude to (overall 52% positive) and behaviour towards soil (overall 60% engagement), they had little competency as to how to improve soil health (overall 23% knowledge). For example, less than 35% of respondents across all countries know that soil is living. Less than 13% of students are aware of the important role of soil in climate change mitigation. We believe that these two knowledge gaps must be addressed for Generation Z to understand the important linkages between climate change, soil and human health. We propose a hands-on ‘ethics of care’ approach to engage society with soil, piggybacking on existing climate change educational resources by building terrariums with living soil can empower children to learn about soil, plant, human and planetary health. The future of food security depends on Generation Z having soil literacy. Our survey clearly shows that students who think farming is a good way to make money have significantly higher levels of overall soil literacy. We propose that the future of human health depends on soil literacy.

In Europe soil health is facing emerging challenges that require innovative solutions and policy interventions. We acknowledge that 62% of the European Union (EU) soils are not in healthy condition, while we face serious challenges such as climate change, food security, biodiversity loss, and socio-economic pressures. The severity of these issues is evident in the fact that soil erosion is unsustainable for around ¼ of the EU territory, carbon stocks in soils are declining, nutrients are depleting, and emerging contaminants can pose a serious threat to soil and human health. The costs of soil degradation in the EU may reach up to €70 billion per year, highlighting the urgent need for action. To address these challenges, the EU has put in place many policies for agro-environmental protection since 2000, including soil protection. The European Green Deal, launched in 2020, has set an ambitious roadmap to make the EU the first carbon-neutral continent with a modern, competitive, and resource-efficient economy. As part of the Green Deal, the European Commission (EC) has put soil protection in a high position on the EU policy agenda, recognizing that healthy soils are essential to achieve climate neutrality, zero pollution, sustainable food provision, and a resilient environment. This increased focus on soil health has led to the development of new policies and initiatives, such as the Soil Monitoring and Resilience Directive, which aims to establish a common framework for monitoring and assessing soil health in the EU. The Soil Monitoring and Resilience Directive, in place since December 2025, lays down measures for monitoring and assessing soil health, managing soils sustainably, and restoring contaminated sites. Furthermore, the Mission Soil, which aims to set up 100 Living Labs to promote sustainable land and soil management in urban and rural areas, will play a crucial role in achieving the objective of healthy soils by 2050. With an estimated investment of nearly €800 million until 2028, funded research projects under the Mission Soil are expected to reverse soil degradation through action on the ground, underpinned by the development and monitoring of a set of indicators. In addition to these initiatives, the Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming (CRCF) regulation is the first EU volunteer framework for certifying carbon removals and carbon farming. This regulation will monitor, report, and verify carbon removals, soil emission reduction, and biodiversity benefits, providing a new opportunity for farmers and other stakeholders to contribute to climate change mitigation. The carbon farming framework can also serve as an interesting business model for additional income to farmers, while involving diverse actors such as certification bodies, auditors, tech industry, and creating new jobs. By promoting sustainable land use practices, the CRCF regulation can help sequester carbon, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and improve soil health. This presentation will discuss these EU soil policies in detail, with a specific focus on the role and activities of the EU Soil Observatory (EUSO). Overall, the presentation will show how the EU soil policies and the EUSO are advancing the data, knowledge and tools on soils and leading the transition towards healthy soils in the EU.

Soils are a vital part of agricultural production. Soil health plays a significant role in the best crop production. Nowadays, our lands are under immense pressure. This pressure may be in the form of climatic changes that affect crop productivity or may be due to population increment that forces our current food system to produce more food to meet consumer needs. Climatic changes affect soil sustainability in the wrong way. Salinity, drought, and heavy metals disturb land structure badly. As the population increases, it dramatically impacts the current production system to fulfill the present needs. In all these situations, agricultural soil sustainability is a challenging factor for soil scientists to make our agriculture sustainable because agricultural sustainability couldn't be possible without maintaining soil health. Many approaches are available to improve soil structure and health. Among these, plant growth-promoting rhizobacterium is a good option. It not only improves soil structure but also helps the plants under abiotic stress conditions.

Soil health refers to soil’s capacity to perform agronomic functions including sustainable production of crops and animals while maintaining and improving the environment. Key indicators of soil health are soil texture, tilth, color, biodiversity, water intake rate, droughtiness, internal drainage, and resilience against perturbation. There is a strong link between soil health and human health. Strategies to manage soil health depend on soil functions and planned land use. The goal to manage soil health in agricultural and forestry ecosystems is to enhance and sustain biomass production while improving water quality, and mitigating and adapting to changing climate. The projected climate change may adversely impact soil health by reducing soil organic matter content, decreasing soil structure, and increasing vulnerability to erosion and other degradation processes. Soil C sequestration by improving soil health is a cost-effective and a natural process of off-setting anthropogenic emissions while also advancing food security and improving the environment.KeywordsConservation AgricultureSoil HealthSoil BiodiversitySoil Quality IndexIntegrate Nutrient ManagementThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Tea ( Camellia sinensis ) cultivation, central to global agriculture and livelihoods, is increasingly challenged by soil degradation, heavy metal contamination, and climate stressors largely driven by intensive practices. Because tea agroecosystems typically occupy acidic, nutrient-poor soils, sustainable management is essential. Biochar, a carbon (C)-rich product of biomass pyrolysis, has emerged as a promising amendment to restore soil health, mitigate contaminants, and strengthen crop resilience. This review synthesizes recent advances on the biochar–soil–tea nexus across five dimensions: (i) soil physicochemical and structural properties, (ii) microbial diversity and functions, (iii) nutrient mobilization and efficiency, (iv) tea productivity and quality, and (v) heavy-metal detoxification. Evidence from field and controlled studies shows that biochar can buffer soil acidity, enhance nutrient retention, restructure microbial communities, reduce pollutant bioavailability, and improve tea growth and quality. In addition, it offers a practice guide for tailoring biochar application based on feedstock and pyrolysis conditions to achieve specific soil and plant health goals. Furthermore, biochar contributes to C sequestration and greenhouse gas mitigation, situating its use within the broader framework of climate-smart agriculture. Despite these benefits, outcomes are highly context-dependent, shaped by feedstock type, pyrolysis conditions, soil characteristics, and application rate. Critical research gaps remain, including scarce tropical field studies, limited long-term field evaluations, inconsistent biochar characterization, and insufficient understanding of cultivar-specific and microbial interactions. By mapping these uncertainties and outlining research priorities, this review provides a foundation for optimizing biochar use in tea systems and guiding region-specific strategies for sustainable cultivation in a changing climate.

In Mediterranean regions, climate change has intensified droughts and extreme weather events, accelerating soil degradation through organic matter loss, erosion, and nutrient depletion. Conservation agriculture (CA), involving practices like zero or reduced tillage, crop diversification, and soil cover maintenance, offers a resilient strategy for mitigating these challenges. This study examines the short-term effects of irrigated CA on soil health in Mediterranean conditions over 3 years (2021–2023). Using the Biofunctool® field kit (assessing carbon transformation, nutrient cycling, and structure maintenance) alongside functional indicators from the laboratory, the study compares CA with conventional tillage (CT) under different water supply methods: sprinkler, subsurface drip, and rainfed conditions. Results reveal that CA enhances soil health indicators from the first year, improving soil aggregation and carbon transformation compared to CT. By 18 months, Soil Health Index (SHI) scores were 38% higher in CA than in CT. Minimal soil disturbance in CA addressed compaction and maintained SHI 23% higher than CT. Neither the water supply mode nor temporality post-CA adoption significantly affected soil functions in the short term. The complementary use of field-based and laboratory indicators provided a holistic view of soil functionality, confirming the potential of CA to improve soil health under irrigated Mediterranean conditions.

Climate change such as rising temperature, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, rainfall variability and altering soil physical, chemical and biological properties are observed all around the world. A review over impacts of clim ate change with relation to crops and soil health was done at Department of Agricultural Meteorology, CCS HAU Hisar. IPCC, 2021 provides new estimates of the chances of crossing the global warming level of 1.5°C in the next decades and finds that unless there are immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, limiting warming to close to 1.5°C or even 2°C will be beyond reach. Impacts of climate change on soil properties are long time process as weather elements induce Physio-chemical reaction with soil which happens slowly in relation to weather elements. Climate change is generally expectedto increase the crop yields due to CO2 fertilization, radiation use efficiency and longer growing season but on the other hand, beyond a critical limit it may develop stress conditions like water stress, sun burns, scorching, bark cracking, closure stomata, leaf senescence and abscission etc. that can decrease crop production. Acidification, sodicity and salinization problem can develop in soil due to increase in temperature and acidic rainfall. So it can be held that, climate change would have intensive impacts on cereal and horticulture crops health and production as well as on soil properties.

Today, the growing global recognition of the critical connections between soil health and climate change is driving widespread acceptance of soil carbon sequestration as an integral component of climate change mitigation and adaptation policies and practices globally. This article provides a brief examination of the historical evolution of federal United States (US) policy on soil carbon sequestration, tracing its origins from twentieth-century soil conservation policies that sought to address soil erosion to today’s focus on nature-based climate solutions. This shift acknowledges climate change as a ‘threat multiplier’ that continues to exacerbate land degradation and food insecurity globally. The article presents an overview of some of the major legislative initiatives and programs to date, including the landmark 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Energy EarthShots™ initiatives to demonstrate how soil health has become central to US mitigation and adaptation strategies. Further, this analysis identifies major impediments to market-based soil carbon sequestration approaches and the risks of corporate greenwashing that could potentially undermine credibility of soil carbon sequestration as a component of nature-based climate change mitigation practices.

Improving soil health is commonly suggested as a way to "buffer" agricultural systems against climate change impacts such as increases in drought, storm severity, and annual temperature. A number of producers in the US Southern Great Plains (SGP) and elsewhere have begun to manage their systems with an emphasis on improving soil health, but adoption of these practices is not yet widespread. There is evidence that soil health management (SHM) has positive effects on soil health that conventional management (CM) does not, but the effects have not been compared to sustainability managed conventional systems, nor have they been quantified using a standard method across regional climatic gradients such as those that characterize the SGP. In this study, we used a network of three pairs of SHM and CM sites at 12 locations in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas to test a suite of biological, chemical, and physical soil health indicators. We analyzed differences among these indicators to better understand how SHM and CM fields compared across the region, and to identify potential effects of precipitation and temperature on these differences. We found that responses to management were not uniform across the SGP and that soil health indicators responded primarily to climate, rather than to management practices. These results suggest that soil health responses as a result of SHM may be constrained by other factors, resulting in variations across the landscape that make soil health assessments challenging. Our findings underscore the importance of understanding management and other impacts on soil health when developing realistic land management goals.

Urban green space management is shifting from intensive maintenance toward sustainable practices in response to climate change and biodiversity loss. While reduced management intensity can enhance ecosystem services such as soil carbon storage, its impacts on overall soil health have been studied less extensively. We evaluated soil health using a composite index of key physical and chemical soil properties across six urban green space types (woody stands, single trees, hedges, wildflower meadows, shrubs, and short-cut lawns) in Giessen, Germany. High-resolution digital orthophotos were used to map Land Use/Land Cover. Soil samples were collected from 120 sites at three depths (0–1, 1–10, and 10–30 cm), totaling 360 samples. Significant differences were observed among green space types in soil health indicators, including soil organic carbon, nitrogen stocks, SOM/clay, C/N, Soil Stability Index, and macronutrient levels. Less intensively managed areas, such as woody stands and wildflower meadows, showed higher soil health status than intensively managed lawns (43.1, 32.5, and 21.7, respectively). Converting 100 m² of lawn to wildflower meadows could increase carbon storage, the key driver of the composite index, by approximately 160 kg. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) (CFI = 0.94) showed that both current and historical green space types like woody stands (β = 0.51), hedges (β= 0.22), wildflower meadows (β= 0.05), and past woody stands (β= 0.31) influence soil health. These findings support the development of urban soil health maps and underscore the value of sustainable green space management in enhancing urban soil health and long-term carbon storage. • Composite index assessed soil health across six urban green space types. • Woody vegetation showed superior soil structure and high carbon storage. • Short-cut lawns were linked to compaction and low soil organic matter. • Improved management could enhance carbon sequestration in short-cut lawns. • Soil health maps identified priority areas for sustainable green space planning.

Although the need for agriculture to adapt to climate change is well established, there is relatively little research within a UK context that explores how the risks associated with climate change are perceived at the farm level, nor how farmers are adapting their businesses to improve resilience in the context of climate change. Based on 31 in-depth, qualitative interviews (15 with farmers and 16 with stakeholders including advisors, consultants and industry representatives) this paper begins to address this gap by exploring experiences, attitudes and responses to extreme weather and climate change. The results point to a mixed picture of resilience to climate risks. All interviewees had experienced or witnessed negative impacts from extreme weather events in recent years but concern was expressed that too few farm businesses are taking sufficient action to increase their business resilience to extreme weather and climate change. Many farmers interviewed for this research did not perceive adaptation to be a priority and viewed the risks as either too uncertain and/or too long-term to warrant any significant investment of time or money at present when many are preoccupied with short-term profitability and business survival. We identified a range of issues and barriers that are constraining improved resilience across the industry, including some lack of awareness about the type and cost-effectiveness of potential adaptation options. Nevertheless, we also found evidence of positive actions being taken by many, whether in direct response to climate change/extreme weather or as a result of other drivers such as soil health, policy and legislation, cost reduction, productivity and changing consumer demands. Our findings reveal a number of actions that can help enable adaption at the farm level including improved industry collaboration, farmer-to-farmer learning, and the need for tools and support that take into account the specificities of different farming systems and that can be easily tailored or interpreted to help farmers understand what climate change means for their particular farm and, crucially, what they can do to increase their resilience to both extreme weather and longer term climate risks.

Managing soil health for climate resilience and crop productivity in a changing environment.

Land degradation is a major problem in Ethiopia, as it contributes to climate change by releasing greenhouse gases (GHG) and slowing carbon sequestration rates. The objective of this review was to assess the role of conservation agriculture (CA) in climate change adaptation and mitigation in Ethiopia. The critical review method processes for identifying and synthesizing peer-reviewed research and review articles, reports, proceedings, and book chapters were followed, with materials obtained from relevant search engines. The findings of the various reports revealed that minimum tillage assists in soil moisture conservation when compared to conventional tillage. Conservation tillage maintains crop residue, reduces soil temperature significantly, and increases nutrient buildup in the surface soil layer, all of which lead to higher crop growth and production thus help as adaptation to climate change. Furthermore, agriculture and other land uses significantly contribute to greenhouse gas emissions; nevertheless, conservation agricultural methods improve soil organic carbon (SOC), soil aggregation, and carbon in aggregate, as well as soil health that contribute to climate changing mitigation. Several studies found that soil health indicators such as soil aggregation, soil organic carbon storage, soil enzymes, and microbial biomass improved under conservation tillage practices, potentially improving the carbon-nitrogen cycle, soil stability, and overall crop productivity. In terms of climate adaptation and mitigation, CA is one of the non-substitutable choices for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Crop diversity, increased nitrogen consumption efficiency, crop rotation, improved soil carbon sequestration methods; crop residue retention, minimum soil disturbance, manure incorporation, and integrated farming systems are all important factors in minimizing GHG emissions. Moreover, factors impeding CA adoption include a lack of appropriate equipment and machinery, weed control methods, the use of crop residue for fuel wood and animal feed, a lack of awareness about the benefits of CA on soil health and sustainability, and a lack of government technical and financial support for smallholder farmers. Adoption and scaling up of CA practices are critical for ensuring a sustainable development goal and resilient future. Thus, relevant stakeholders should consider the aforementioned considerations while promoting the technology on a large scale through integration with enhanced technology.

Climate change is creating opportunities for agricultural expansion northward into the boreal forest. Converting forested land to agricultural land generally results in significant losses of organic matter (OM), which can impact soil health (SH). The objectives of this study were to assess the effects of land conversion on indicators of SH and to use the Comprehensive Assessment for Soil Health (CASH) framework to integrate measures of these indicators into a score to evaluate land conversion effects. Total carbon and nitrogen were also measured in this study. Soils (0–5 and 5–15 cm) were collected from six dairy farms near Thunder Bay, ON, that included a mature forest, a field converted from forest to agriculture <10 years ago and a field converted from forest to agriculture >50 years ago. Land conversion resulted in significant declines in permanganate oxidizable carbon, wet aggregate stability, soil respiration, and concentrations of OM, autoclave citrate extractable protein, total nitrogen, and total carbon. Lower CASH scores in the soils converted to agriculture are interpreted to represent a decline in SH but the scores, along with soil organic matter (SOM) concentrations, remain high (CASH = 80; OM = 6%). There was no effect of time since conversion, suggesting that any degradation to SH happens quickly and is closely tied to declines in SOM.

Soil health is central for provisioning and supporting ecosystem services for both agriculture and restored natural lands. Agricultural systems create different challenges for soil health that can degrade land and require implementation of restoration strategies. It is important that restoration practices create landscapes that are resilient to the combined challenges of climate, environmental and land-use change, and consideration of soil health is vital to achieve this. Here, we highlight the usefulness and practicality of soil health and degradation indicators for the restoration of degradation gradients caused by current agricultural practices. We emphasise the importance of integrating state-of-the-art knowledge of plant-microorganism interactions, which are the ‘engine’ driving many ecosystem functions, and the key ecological concepts of plant-soil feedback and biodiversity-ecosystem function relationships, to enhance soil health as part of a restoration strategy. Finally, we emphasise how consideration of scale and connectedness in restoration practices is vital for maximise ecosystem multifunctionality.