CA4SH and “4 per 1000” at the 13th Session of the Global Soil Partnership Plenary Assembly
June 4, 2025 - The 13th Session of the Global Soil Partnership (GSP) Plenary Assembly took place at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) headquarters from 3 to 5 June 2025. It served as a key platform to celebrate FAO’s 80th anniversary by highlighting achievements in soil and land at national, regional, and global levels. The Coalition of Action 4 Soil Health (CA4SH) and the International “4 per 1000” Initiative jointly delivered a keynote presentation on Partners’ Day, emphasizing the role of evidence to inform policy and practice, as well as the critical importance of multistakeholder action to improve soil health globally.
Grounded in Science: Innovations and Partnerships in Monitoring for Soil Health Action
Soils are not just the foundation beneath our feet; they are living, breathing systems that sustain life on Earth. From carbon sequestration and regulating climate to producing food production, cycling nutrients, cultural heritage, and providing habitat for biodiversity, healthy soil delivers essential ecosystem services that are central to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Yet today, over one-third of the Earth’s surface is degraded, affecting the lives of 3.2 billion people. Soil erosion is the most widespread form of land degradation, threatening food security and amplifying climate impacts. At the same time, soil health continues to be treated in fragmented ways across the three Rio Conventions, highlighting the need to strengthen synergies and align implementation and monitoring mechanisms across biodiversity, climate, and desertification frameworks.
“Soil is the indispensable starting point of all action.”
Bridging Science and Policy: Four Key Actions for Soil Health
Understanding what soil and healthy soil are
Defining soil health shapes how we measure progress and design solutions. According to the Intergovernmental Technical Panel on Soils (2020), “healthy soil is the ability of the soil to sustain the productivity, diversity, and environmental services of terrestrial ecosystems”.
In practice, this refers to soils that are productive, biologically diverse, and resilient to degradation and climate impacts. Healthy soil supports human and ecological well-being, contributing to multiple development goals. Healthy soil is also a unifier: it serves as a common thread linking food and nutrition security, climate action, drought resilience, biodiversity conservation, and sustainable agriculture.
What does healthy soil mean? (Source: CA4SH)
2. Generating evidence on soil health and how interventions impact soil
“Once we have a definition, we need to collect systematic and comparable data to inform policy and practice.”
Evidence is the cornerstone of effective action. Monitoring soil health, grounded in data, field observation, and community knowledge, is essential to prioritize investments, track progress, and identify effective interventions.
To do this effectively, monitoring must rely on multiple indicators that capture the physical, chemical, and biological aspects of soil, while also integrating land use and social dimensions to ensure frameworks are inclusive and practical. Identifying the most relevant indicators for each specific context is key to generating useful, comparable, and actionable data.
As countries develop and implement national action plans, targeted investments in soil monitoring are key to grounding strategies in reliable evidence, informing concrete decisions, and tracking impact over time.
Innovative frameworks like the Land Degradation Surveillance Framework (LDSF) are already setting the standard for integrated monitoring. By combining multiple innovative monitoring techniques, such as remote sensing, field assessments, and citizen science, the LDSF helps understand drivers of land degradation and engages local communities in restoration efforts. This enables better targeting and tracking of restoration progress in real time. When aligned with national data systems, tools like the LDSF can help close key knowledge gaps and position evidence at the center of decision-making.
3. Leveraging this evidence to inform policy and practice
Bringing evidence to bear on decision-making is key.
At the national level, CA4SH and AICCRA engaged with countries to assess how soil health is reflected in the second round of their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). This process led to the development of six policy briefs that identify opportunities to integrate soil health and soil carbon into NDCs. This work strengthened cross-sectoral collaboration and partnerships at the national level.
At the regional level, AUDA-NEPAD, with the support of partners including CA4SH, co-produced soil health resources to equip African Union member states with monitoring, policy, and technical guidance towards implementing the new CAADP Kampala Strategy. A key opportunity is to integrate soil health indicators directly into the CAADP Kampala Framework, ensuring that existing data is not only available but also usable in policy and planning processes.
At the global level, CA4SH and “4 per 1000” co-developed the Soil Health Resolution, a set of commitments to enable and scale healthy soil practices to mitigate and adapt to climate change, restore biodiversity, improve water resilience, enhance food and nutrition security, and protect natural and cultural heritage. Drafted with support from governments and partners across the Coalition, the resolution has undergone several rounds of contributions and revisions. Member States are encouraged to adopt the Soil Health Resolution and take it forward into formal negotiations. Three options are proposed:
Adopt the Resolution in its current form;
Extract relevant commitments that suit national priorities and capacities;
Use the commitments as a starting point for drafting unique commitments that suit national needs.
4. Multi-stakeholder engagement around soil health
Lasting change depends on inclusive, multi-stakeholder engagement. CA4SH is fostering collaboration across farmers, scientists, governments, youth, local communities, and the private sector, to co-develop and scale soil solutions that are evidence-based and grounded in local realities.
By strengthening this community of practice, soil health is gaining visibility in global policy discussions. For example, the inclusion of “enhancing soil health” in the COP28 UAE Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems, and Climate Action. Collective action can make change happen and build lasting momentum around soil health.
Call to action
Healthy soil is central to ecosystem restoration, climate adaptation and mitigation, biodiversity conservation, and food and nutrition security. Grounding policy and practice in robust scientific evidence can help maximize the impact of financial investments, human resource capacity, and technical efforts, ensuring interventions are more effective, efficient, and scalable.
We encourage all stakeholders to endorse the Soil Health Resolution and help bring soil health to the center of global action.
Key resources
Soil Carbon Note #2: what has been achieved in terms of considering soils and soil health?
The LDSF Field Manual: Land and Soil Health Assessments using the Land Degradation Surveillance Framework (LDSF) (Tor-G. Vågen and Leigh Ann Winowiecki)
MRV systems related to Soil health in the context of Agroecology and the “4 per 1000” Initiative
Policy briefs on including soil organic carbon into Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs)
