Earth Today | New report champions soils as conservation, food security tool
Published:Thursday | February 16, 2023 | 12:57 AM
A NEW report from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has made the case for best efforts to preserve grassland soils, not only for food security, but also for biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation.
Grasslands are large areas covered with grass and are used especially for animal grazing. Soils can act as both sources of and sinks for carbon, which is a significant driver of global warming and associated climate impacts, including extreme weather events, rising sea levels and related public health threats.
“There is room for additional carbon storage in some grassland soils,” said the report titled Global assessment of soil carbon in grasslands: From current stock estimates to sequestration potential.
“The main recommendations for grassland systems are to prioritise carbon returns in deteriorated soils that have a negative carbon balance, and to protect soil organic carbon (SOC) in areas – particularly under unimproved grasslands – with high carbon stocks,” it added.
“Grasslands could contribute to the recarbonisation of degraded land, and the results of the present study can highlight hotspots where interventions on grasslands are needed to preserve or increase SOC in the long term,” the FAO report said further.
Done to illustrate the state of soil carbon stocks in grassland systems and their potential to sequester carbon in the soil, the report – a 76-page document – was prepared by FAO Livestock Environmental Assessment and Performance Partnership and the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment.
It cautioned that a negative carbon balance was found in East Asia, Central and South America, as well as Africa south of the equator, “meaning that the current SOC stocks are likely to be decreasing due to anthropogenic stresses combined with climatic conditions”.
Anthropogenic stressors include intensive livestock grazing, as well as agricultural and other land-use activities.
“No specific global measurements are currently available, and it is worth mentioning that the diversity of situations – in terms of climate, soils and management practices – might have been crucial for soil carbon dynamics in these areas,” the report said.
At the same time, it encouraged the inclusion of SOC into nationally determined contributions (NDCs), which reflect country efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that fuel climate change, as well as their adaptation to impacts.
“A recent review of 184 countries’ initial NDCs found that only 28 countries referred to SOC in their NDCs. Countries’ reasons for not including SOC in NDCs included the need to prioritise goals of sustainable development and food security above climate mitigation, a lack of incentives for farmers to improve management practices, and the difficulty of accurately monitoring changes in SOC,” it said.
“The results of this report could therefore support the inclusion of SOC targets in NDCs, which will improve NDCs’ comprehensiveness and transparency for tracking and comparing policy progress across NDCs,” it added.
Meanwhile, to get the full benefits of the carbon sequestration from the soil, the report also recommends improved soil management practices.
“The adoption of improved management practices offers the opportunity to sequester significant amounts of carbon in the near term, and potentially to make an important contribution to global mitigation efforts,” it said.
Also important, the report added, is “involving local experts and institutions” for modelling improvements together with knowledge exchange.