Despite growing interest in sustainable rangeland management and restoration, there is currently no widely accepted framework for monitoring ecological outcomes across rangeland systems. Existing approaches vary considerably in the indicators used, methods applied, and scales of assessment, making it difficult to compare results, aggregate data, or demonstrate progress consistently across landscapes and regions. These challenges are particularly apparent in rangelands, where high spatial and temporal variability in ecological conditions, climatic fluctuations, and diverse management systems can complicate the interpretation of ecological change. While rangeland resilience also includes important social, cultural and economic dimensions, a key gap currently lies in the measurement of biophysical changes across rangeland landscapes.

This framework responds to that need by defining a harmonised set of indicators of rangeland health and associated methodological principles that enable comparability across regions while allowing flexibility for adaptation to local contexts.

Rangelands cover more than half the planet’s land surface and sustain the livelihoods, either directly or indirectly, of billions of people. Yet, an estimated 40–50% of these systems show signs of degradation, manifesting as soil erosion, woody encroachment, and declining forage productivity, placing global food security, climate goals, and local livelihoods at risk. While several monitoring frameworks and tools to measure rangeland condition exist, most remain fragmented, narrow in scope, and difficult to compare across projects, sectors, or regions. A credible, global monitoring framework is needed to guide investment, anchor emerging livestock value-chain standards, and track progress toward international restoration targets.

This review synthesizes rangeland monitoring insights from four key source domains: (i) twelve widely used field-based frameworks, (ii) fourteen sustainability standards with mandated landscape monitoring components, (iii) five Earthobservation (EO) platforms that report on rangeland indicators; and (iv) two citizen science mobile applications. We integrate these findings with a review of 62 peer-reviewed studies, along with the insights and recommendations from a multi-stakeholder consultation workshop convened in Nairobi in October 2024.

Up to 40% of the world’s land is degraded, affecting more than 3.2 billion people and increasingly putting the businesses and economies that depend on healthy land at risk. These pressures are driven by unsustainable land use and economic incentives that prioritize short-term production over long-term soil health, compounded by climate change.

Healthy soil is not only an environmental or agricultural imperative; it is a strategic economic asset. Yet soil remains largely invisible in how governments, businesses and investors assess value and manage risk.

This paper makes the business case for action: soil dependency is business dependency. Healthy soils support productivity, resilience and long-term value, while degraded soils create growing risks. Recognizing and investing in soil health is both urgent and achievable.

This Implementation Guide is an action and advocacy tool that aims to help youth and allied actors design and implement activities that help to achieve the global youth priorities, and align and integrate youth priorities in global frameworks. The Guide builds on the co-creation process that produced the Youth4Soil Manifesto. It draws on the contributions of over 250 youth individuals and 60 youth-led organizations across regions, gathered through surveys, consultations, dialogues, and a call for stories. The Guide highlights key recommendations, enabling conditions, entry points for specific actors, and resources to support implementation of the Global Youth Priorities.

Soil health information is a critical tool for identifying intervention areas to reverse land degradation, providing tailored fertilizer recommendations, and supporting policy processes, among myriad other benefits. Multistakeholder actors in Africa are already collecting data and sharing them with their wider networks, but many of these data sharing systems are limited in scope, cumbersome or locked behind institutional barriers. Fostering collaborative soil knowledge exchange could bolster the uptake of soil health data to drive evidence-based action on behalf of food systems, the environment, and people. Despite new continental momentum toward scaling soil health supported by data, there is limited stocktaking or documented baselines on current initiatives toward scaling soil health. This review seeks to address this gap and support the consolidation of efforts and initiatives at continental and national levels.

The results of this review can help prioritize and streamline efforts to build a collaborative soil data sharing community toward enhanced action in Africa under the Norad-funded initiative, Establishing an ecosystem of soil data-driven services.

Between 27 April and 10th May, 2026, #Youth4Soil engaged the cohort in Kenya in a data drive using the Regreening App to generate participatory, credible and standardized data while strengthening both scientific understanding and community action among youth. By engaging directly in data collection, youth became active contributors to evidence‐based decision‐making rather than passive beneficiaries of external interventions.

The experiences documented in this brief highlight how the initiative empowered youth with skills, credibility and advocacy capacity, positioning them as agents of change. The initiative fostered stronger youth networks and enhanced confidence, while the lasting impact will be reflected in improved soil practices, informed policies, and resilient communities that can better withstand future shocks.

This brief presents: 

1. The evidence base for soil health as a key indicator of rangeland restoration, resulting from improved and inclusive land governance which is foundational to rangelands restoration. 

2. Priority actions for key stakeholders.

3. Contributions to the implementation of Decision 29/COP.16 on rangelands and pastoralists, Decision 19/COP.16 on agricultural lands, and the Rangelands Flagship Initiative to be launched at COP17. 

4. Key Messages for COP17:  

This knowledge product demonstrates how soil health serves as a unifying foundation across the three Rio Conventions—the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)—while contributing to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It reviews the key policy mechanisms under each Convention and identifies opportunities to strengthen the integration of soil health into national implementation, monitoring, and reporting processes.

This policy brief outlines the case for policymakers to scale SISs and integrate monitoring of SOC in national reporting towards the goals of the Rio Conventions. It explores the context and need for advancing SISs to support voluntary targets laid out in national LDN, NBSAPs, and NCDs.

Healthy soil and land underpin food security, climate resilience, biodiversity and livelihoods, yet decisions about land use, especially in rangelands, are often made with limited or inconsistent data. This research highlights the scale of the problem by reviewing existing rangeland monitoring frameworks, standards and remote sensing platforms, revealing significant gaps and a lack of harmonization in how land health is measured and reported.

Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems Special Feature on Climate-Smart Food Systems

Abstract

Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) has become a central framework for addressing the intersecting challenges of food security and climate change. Assessments of CSA have largely relied on measuring the adoption of practices and technologies rather than the ecological outcomes they are intended to deliver. This article argues that the absence of systematic soil health monitoring represents a critical measurement gap in CSA, limiting the ability to verify whether interventions genuinely enhance resilience, contribute to adaptation and mitigation, and sustain productivity. Drawing on two decades of research, we show that soil health underpins all three CSA objectives - adaptation, mitigation and productivity - through its role in regulating water availability, nutrient cycling, carbon storage and biodiversity conservation. We propose scaling outcome-based monitoring to complement practice-based monitoring, positioning soil health as an integrating metric that aligns climate, land degradation and biodiversity agendas. Standardized landscape monitoring approaches, including repeated georeferenced measurements of soil health indicators through frameworks such as the Land Degradation Surveillance Framework (LDSF), demonstrate that operationalisation is feasible and can generate longitudinal datasets. The recent embedding of soil health indicators within multi-level policy frameworks and reporting systems signals political support for implementing consistent soil health monitoring frameworks. Strengthening soil monitoring infrastructure is therefore essential for improving accountability, informing implementation and enabling performance-based climate finance.

This review provides a stocktake of the status and maturity of SISs in six African countries: Ethiopia , Ghana , Kenya , Malawi, Rwanda , and Tanzania based on a desk review and stakeholder consultations. The assessment examined eight core dimensions:

1. Existence of an online portal;

2. Data Content and Spatial Extent/ Coverage;

3. Use of the Data;

4. Field Data Collection and Sampling Standards;

5. Sample Handling and Laboratory Quality Assurance;

6. Data Management and Infrastructure;

7. Data Analysis and Modelling Capacity;

8. Institutional Arrangements and Stakeholders

The findings reveal uneven progress across countries. Ethiopia and Rwanda have established online platforms, yet these systems are not fully leveraged for decision-making. Ghana and Tanzania made significant advances through the AfSIS Phase II project (GhaSIS and TanSIS), but progress slowed once project funding ended. Kenya and Malawi remain in the early stages of SIS development. Across all countries, the most consistent progress has been in building momentum on the importance of soil data and soil sample data collection, largely driven by externally funded projects.

CA4SH is now a multistakeholder Coalition of over 350 diverse organizations and individuals working together to scale global soil health through collective action. As the Coalition has grown over the years, so too has the need to adapt and refine our strategy to engage effectively with our partners. 

2025 was marked by this spirit of continual learning, which we are operationalizing through an updated strategic framework. Key to the success of this model is strategic engagement in diverse fora, and in 2025, we did just that; CA4SH had a strong presence at global, national and regional events and has launched several unique initiatives to engage in these processes. For example, in 2025, we played a role in streamlining soil health in the Comprehensive African Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) by engaging at the CAADP Partnership Platform in Kigali, Rwanda, and we launched a new joint initiative for establishing an ecosystem of soil data driven services in four African countries to support the CAADP implementation. Underpinning all of our work is youth engagement, and several youth partner initiatives engaged in these processes and implemented unique, context-specific projects on the ground. 

CA4SH will celebrate its fifth anniversary in 2026, and we have much to look back on and learn from to chart the next five years and beyond. 

The Soil Health Resolution is 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.

Healthy soil is the foundation of resilient landscapes, sustainable food systems, and climate adaptation in Africa’s drylands. As a unifying element across climate, nutrition, biodiversity, and restoration agendas, soil health plays a critical role in realising the ambitions of the African Union’s Great Green Wall Initiative (GGWI). With over 65% of productive land degraded and soil erosion undermining agricultural productivity, smallholder farmers across the continent face compounding vulnerabilities. The GGWI Strategy (2024–2034) recognises soil health as central to reversing land degradation and building long-term resilience, aligning closely with the Africa Fertiliser and Soil Health Action Plan (AFSH-AP) (2023 – 2033) and broader goals outlined in the Ten-Year Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) Strategy and Action Plan (2026-2035).

Healthy soil is critical for ecosystem restoration, climate change mitigation and adaptation, biodiversity conservation, water cycling, farmer livelihoods, and food and nutrition security. Despite its importance, soil health has often been overlooked, but momentum is growing as evidenced by recent high-level initiatives such as the Nairobi Declaration as part of the Africa Fertiliser and Soil Health Action Plan and the European Union Soil Mission: A Soil Deal for Europe. The UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration was launched on 5 June 2021 to galvanise local, national and global action to restore degraded ecosystems. In the same year, the UN Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) initiated a call for coalitions of action to champion integrated, systemic approaches to transform food systems. The Coalition of Action 4 Soil Health (CA4SH) was launched to bring soil health into focus with participation across sectors and scales to ultimately raise awareness about this critical ecosystem that we depend on, but which is being degraded at unprecedented rates. Since 2021, CA4SH has grown to include nearly 200 members (as of January 2025) representing the public and private sectors, research institutions, non-governmental organisations, farmer organisations and cooperatives, individuals, youth-led organisations, and indigenous organisations to mention some. The initiative has also had a strong focus on gender equity and social inclusion (GESI) in soil and landscape restoration. The Coalition promotes soil as a unifier across a diverse set of stakeholders, building partnerships to overcome critical economic, technical and institutional barriers to the adoption and scaling of healthy soil practices. Furthermore, CA4SH facilitates evidence-based policy and practice action for the scaling of restoration practices that improve soil health. The Private Sector Guiding Group, launched as part of the UNFSS, developed a call to action to support increased investments in healthy soil, and continues to support the actions of the Coalition. Its four working groups focus on communication, soil health monitoring and implementation, policy, and financial investment. In the first three years since its launch, the Coalition has engaged in multinational dialogues and contributed to the adoption of soil health in the outcomes from the UN Framework Convention of Climate Change (UNFCCC) 27th Conference of the Parties (COP27) through the Koronivia joint work on agriculture (now the Sharm El-Sheikh Declaration), the UNFCCC COP28 UAE Declaration on Food Systems and Agriculture, the UNCCD COP16 Riyadh Action Agenda and also launched the Soil Health Resolution. Leveraging on the enabling policy environment, the Coalition catalyses public and private sector action with outcomes for economic returns and growth, productivity and rural livelihoods, climate and nature. The positioning of the Coalition in the current global environmental transition is pivotal to drive the multifaceted benefits that soil health improvement offers to food systems transformation and global adaptation to and mitigation of climate change.

This Brief focuses on soil health on the African Continent, drawing on discussions with senior government officials from Ministries of Agriculture across Africa, who convened in Kigali as part of the Policy Dialogue series in September 2024 to discuss issues related to the implementation of the Africa Fertilizer and Soil Health Action Plan. This Policy Dialogue aimed to: identify policy action to incentivize and support the improvement of soil health and environmentally sustainable fertilizer use, including fertilizer subsidy reform programs; and share lessons learned, challenges and opportunities for policy reform to enhance effectiveness of fertilizer support and other public programs on soil health and sustainability

2024 was a big year for soil health and for the Coalition of Action 4 Soil Health (CA4SH). We engaged global stakeholders in united advocacy to scale soil health through our priority areas of action, including science, policy, finance, youth engagement, and implementation on the ground. Scaling soil health can not happen in a vacuum; it requires the diverse perspectives, expertise, experience, and networks of the global community to come together. CA4SH is uniquely positioned to bring these voices together, offering a community and a meeting place for these partnerships to grow and bloom, and in 2024, we did just that in the name of healthy soil.

African Heads of State and Government formally adopted the Africa Fertilizer and Soil Health (AFSH) Summit Declaration, also known as the Nairobi Declaration, during the AFSH Summit. The AFSH Summit addressed the urgent need to improve soil health and enhance fertilizer utilization across the continent to boost agricultural productivity and alleviate hunger and poverty. These priorities were initially identified in the 2006 Abuja Declaration on Fertilizer for the African Green Revolution.

Furthermore, the 2014 Malabo Declaration under the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Program (CAADP) reaffirmed AU Member States' commitment to inclusive agricultural transformation, building on earlier initiatives such as the 2003 Maputo Declaration on CAADP and the 2004 Sirte Declaration on sustainable agriculture and water management. Despite these commitments, AU Member States have faced significant challenges in implementing the objectives outlined in these declarations.

Only through collaborative, cohesive soil health monitoring efforts can AU Member States ensure that interventions are based on evidence to maximize impact. For example, such a monitoring framework can be used to prioritize, track and adapt locally revelant interventions. In turn these data can be used to inform policy and financial investments. This policy brief outlines the case for African policymakers to scale soil information systems (SISs) and integrate them into continental, regional and national policy frameworks.