Soil: A Weapon for Food Security and Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation

Abstract

The world has already been reported to has been affected by the extreme climatic conditions and facing greater challenge for feeding its teeming population against a backdrop of a changing climate and growing competition for land, water, labour and energy. It is critical to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by agriculture, presently estimated at 30%.1 Soil is the greatest non renewable resource or renewable only at human scale. Soils provide essential ecosystem services by providing food, feed, fibre and fuel for humans, harbouring biodiversity, filtering drinking water, sequestering carbon (C) etc.2 Judicious management practices of soil in agricultural, forest and grassland ecosystems can enhance sustainable soil health and thus results in sustainable food and environmental security. Sequestering carbon in soils in terrestrial ecosystems will help mitigation of an adaptation to global climate change. Carbon sequestration in soils can help mitigate global climate change.3 Enhanced soil organic matter content will strengthen nutrient cycling in soils for sustainable productivity in vulnerable soils to climate change across land use systems and in various problem soils like saline soils, acid sulphate soils, draught prone land etc. Biodiversity conservation, closely related to terrestrial and aquatic C sequestration.4 Soil ecosystem services can be economic, social and environmental which can extend from local to global. Soil erosion, fertility loss, salinity, acidification, compaction and the loss of carbon are natural processes that can be accelerated tremendously by excessive use of soil and inappropriate management practices.