NotesCORDIS Results Pack on soil health. A thematic collection of innovative EU-funded research results
Abstract
Soil is the foundation of our lives. Soil services are essential for the provision of food through agriculture, energy and raw materials, carbon sequestration, water purification, nutrient regulation, biodiversity preservation and pest control, to name but a few. This CORDIS Results Pack highlights projects working in the field of soil research that have recently finished or will soon end and also introduces two newer projects that promise to make valued contributions over the coming years.
# Life on Earth depends on healthy soil.
# 95 % of global food production relies on soil.
# Soil is home to a quarter of all terrestrial species, and it plays a crucial role in nutrient cycling as well as in storing carbon and filtering water, which helps mitigate climate change and prevent flooding and droughts.
# In Europe alone, poor land management practices account for an estimated 970 million tons of soil lost to erosion each year.
# Soils form the largest terrestrial carbon pool: estimated at 2 300 gigatons, two to three times more than atmospheric carbon. Healthy soils store large quantities of carbon as soil organic carbon (SOC). This has tremendous potential in the fight against man-made climate change, as stabilisation mechanisms in organic matter stores carbon over decades to millennia.
# According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the world’s topsoil – which we need to grow 95 % of our food – could be gone within 60 years. If that were to happen, nature would take 1 000 years to rebuild it.
As if that wasn’t alarming enough, many questions related to the creation of a more sustainable land management model still go unanswered. We don’t know, for instance, which soil properties can be used as reliable markers of improvement in soil quality.
Yet regardless of soils’ fundamental role in the functioning of our planet’s ecosystems, soils in Europe (and globally) are being degraded, which is now starting to have far-reaching consequences, for food security and safety, the integrity of ecosystems and the services they provide to humanity. Urgent action is needed, especially as it takes considerable time to (re)generate soils and restore soil health.
The 12 fully featured projects in this Results Pack highlight the synergies between what has already been achieved and how these results can be taken further under Horizon Europe and the proposed EU mission in the area of Soil health and food.