Highlights from the CA4SH February 2024 Partners Meeting

28 February 2024: CA4SH partners, members, allies, and more met for the first quarterly partner meeting of the Coalition for the year.

The meeting was a chance to reflect on key engagements from 2023, lay out the roadmap for 2024, hear from partners about their work, foster linkages between partners, and brainstorm key messages and opportunities for CA4SH in 2024 and beyond.

Dr Rattan Lal shared opening remarks, highlighting the crucial role that soil health plays in food and nutrition security. He also shared insights from his recent work exploring Soil, Soul, Spirituality, and Stewardship for the Journal of Soil and Water Conservation. A common thread between science, spirituality, and environmentalism is the desire to protect, restore, and manage the natural environment; our efforts must work in harmony.

To date, the core work of CA4SH has been focused on communication, engagement, and advocacy. Moving forward, we want to drive implementation and action on the ground with robust monitoring and evidence-based data and mobilize resources to scale healthy soil practices that are good for people and the planet.

Some of the ways we hope to do this in 2024 include:

• Generating evidence and examples of good practices and lessons learned from across the Coalition, so that we can garner support for projects and scale approaches

• Exploring regional and thematic links between flagship initiatives working on the ground to restore and protect soil health

• Scaling our advocacy efforts and communicating connections between the three Rio Conventions

• Working on a joint programme with The Indigenous Partnership for Agrobiodiversity and Food Sovereignty (TIP)

• Finding and asserting the role of CA4SH in soil health monitoring frameworks, including establishing a baseline of global soil health, developing metrics for monitoring soil health over time, and providing joint messaging on the role of soil health

• Holding fundraising events and making a business case for investing in soil health

• Fostering peer-to-peer learning for farmers, youth soil advocates, and more!

In the meeting, we also heard from CA4SH members who shared their updates, including presentations from the Farm of Francesco and the Sustainable Soil Alliance. Below is a summary:

• The Sustainable Soil Alliance (SSA) is a new member of CA4SH, and they shared their roots in advocating for soil health in post-Brexit Britain. Despite having negative implications for farmers, Brexit opened up a unique opportunity for advocates to push for better policy spaces in the UK. SSA's approach involves incentivizing healthy soil practices without relying entirely on subsidies.

• The WorldBio Protection Forum is working on biocontrol, biostimulants, and biofertilisers for crop protection and plant health management in the same post-Brexit context as the SSA.

• The International Association of Students in Agricultural and Related Sciences (IAAS) is implementing more than 38 on-the-ground projects across the world, which are entirely youth-led.

• The Farm of Francesco is also a youth-led group addressing agriculture and justice through farmer training focusing on improving livelihoods and bringing voices to the key processes (including the CoPs).

• The International Union of Soil Science Centennial celebration is coming up in May!

• WWF’s Food Forward NDCs is a web-based policy tool that provides details of 30+ policy options to include in NDCs and their implementation for food systems.

• The International Fertilizer Development Centre (IFDC) is hosting two high-level symposia this year, one in Washington, DC (June) and one in The Netherlands (November): "Future Proofing: Unified Action for Soil Health and Food Security."

• AAPRESID’s Annual Congress will take place on August 7-9 in Buenos Aires.

• The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is working on several projects, addressing the challenge of traditional agriculture to combat climate change not being deemed enough to qualify for CC finance.

The activities carried out within the Coalition and amongst our members and partners are continually evolving and reaching new heights. These quarterly partner meetings are an important part of CA4SH culture, and foster linkages between soil health actors around the world.

Reach out to participate in future meetings, and please continue to engage with us!

Hanna North, CA4SH Communications

communications@coalitionforsoilhealth.org