The International Union of Soil Science (IUSS) will celebrate its foundation centennial in 2024 in cooperation with the Italian Soil Science Society (SISS). The event will empower the linkages with different disciplines, policy makers, stakeholders, institutions, and associations to effectively address civil society needs within agriculture, forestry, environment, urban planning, energy, education, and other societal issues. The celebration will occur on May 19th and will be followed by two days of congress, with plenary and parallel scientific sessions. Both soil scientists and specialists from other disciplines will participate in each session, focusing on past achievements and future challenges. The congress will be followed by technical and scientific excursions that will range from short, local to long trips, spanning from the Alps to Sicily.

CA4SH Sessions

Advances in soil health monitoring

Healthy soils are the foundation of sustainable and regenerative food systems and provide several vital ecosystem services. Sequestering carbon in soils, for example, can have multiple benefits for climate change mitigation and adaptation, food and nutrition security, biodiversity, and water resilience. However one third of the Earth’s surface is degraded, negatively affecting 3.2 billion people annually. Therefore, targeted investments in soil health are urgently needed. This includes investments in robust methods for monitoring soil health to prioritize and track land management efforts over time. This session will showcase advancements in soil health monitoring from robust field survey designs, to innovations in laboratory methods including soil spectroscopy, as well as advancements in remote sensing. The session will highlight the critical importance for these monitoring methodologies to be applied to answer key knowledge gaps on the impact of land management and landscape restoration practices on soil health. Furthermore, this session will highlight the inclusion of citizen science, to bring stakeholders and communities into the monitoring process, which can lead to the scaling of healthy soil practice. Finally,, this session will discuss opportunities to bring evidence to bear for decision making.

Soil Ambitions: Driving soil health into national and international policy

Healthy soils are the foundation of sustainable and regenerative food systems and provide several vital ecosystem services, including sequestration of carbon, provision of critical nutrients, hosting biodiversity, and regulating the water cycle. However, there are few policies that incentivize farmers and pastoralists to invest in practices to maintain and improve soil health. This session will highlight opportunities to include soil health in policies and strategies at the national level, including in the National Determined Contributions (NDCs) as well as ongoing efforts to recognize soil health in the Rio Conventions (UNCCD, UNFCCC, UNCBD) and beyond.

For example, soil has recently made its way into high-level policy mechanisms such as the Australian National Soil Strategy and the European Union Soil Strategy for 2030, and is gaining ground through the United Kingdom with the Soil Health Inquiry. Recent policy assessments identified opportunities for integrating soil health and soil organic carbon in the NDCS (https://bit.ly/46wgO86). In global dialogues, soil health was also included in the decisions following the UNFCCC COP27 in 2022, through the Koronivia joint working group on agriculture, but translating these decisions into enabling policy mechanisms is not a linear path.

This session will contribute to increasing awareness of the need for soil health to be integrated into policy. The session will bring together stakeholders from research, policy, development and farmer organizations, and governments to discuss opportunities to engage and integrate soil health into policy at national and international levels. Key outcomes for the session include: 1) Expand the policy analysis to across countries to identify entry points for soil health; 2) Bring together actors from government, research private sector, and development to share experiences in working with policy makers to scale healthy soil practices; and 3) Identify key action points to support governments to fill knowledge gaps and bring evidence to bear to support policy and decision making.