How Healthy Soil Aligns the Rio Conventions and Global Agendas

Aug 18

Healthy soils underpin climate resilience, biodiversity, food security, water regulation, and sustainable livelihoods by providing critical functions and services. As the foundation of terrestrial ecosystems and food systems, a focus on soil health offers a unique opportunity to address the interconnected challenges of land degradation, biodiversity loss, climate change, and declining agricultural productivity. Yet despite its cross-cutting importance, soil health remains insufficiently integrated across global policy frameworks, resulting in fragmented implementation, monitoring, and investment.

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 report highlights five key messages:

Soil health is a unifying foundation that simultaneously advances the objectives of the UNCCD, CBD, UNFCCC, and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Integrated soil health monitoring, including biological indicators such as soil organic carbon, microbial biomass and soil biodiversity, alongside physical and chemical indicators, provides a practical mechanism for harmonising national reporting across Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) targets, Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), National Adaptation Plans (NAPs), and National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs), reducing duplication while strengthening evidence-based decision-making.
Strengthening soil health requires coordinated action across policy, finance, science, and implementation, supported by robust soil data, enabling governance, and targeted, long-term investment.
Scaling soil health depends on inclusive partnerships, recognising the knowledge and leadership of farmers, pastoralists, Indigenous Peoples, women, youth, local communities, researchers, and the private sector.
The 2026 Rio Convention COPs present a timely opportunity to move from recognising the importance of healthy soils to embedding soil health within national policies, implementation frameworks, and monitoring systems that deliver multiple environmental, economic, and social benefits.