Healthy soils sustain foodsystem transformationsto contribute to the net zeroCO2emission target by 2050

CONTEXT

• Climate crisis calls for urgent transformations.

• The Parties agreed at COP 21 UNFCCC1 (Paris 2015) to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to maintain by 2100 the global mean temperature on Earth below +2°C compared to the pre-industrial global temperature.

• The sixth IPCC2 report indicates that we are not on track, with a global temperature increase already reaching +1.01°C in the 2011-2020 period.

• Food systems contribute to a third of these global emissions, 70% of them being due to agriculture, land use, and land use change activities (AFOLU).

• Agriculture provides 95% of food to humanity.

• Soils provide to societies and ecosystems a wide diversity of services.

• Loss of ecosystem services through land degradation, a ecting 3.2 billion people worldwide, has reached high levels in many parts of the world.

• By 2030, the most vulnerable people will suffer from:

  • A global decrease in food production due to more frequent crop failures.

  • An increase by nearly one billion hectares of degraded land, provided a similar rate of degradation.