Abstract
Soils generate agricultural, environmental, and socio-economic benefits that are vital to human life. The enormity of threats to global soil stocks raises the imperative for securing this vital resource. To contribute to the security framing and advancement of the soil security concept and discourse, this paper provides a working definition and proposes dimensions that can underpin the conceptualization of soil security. In this paper, soil security refers to safeguarding and improving the quality, quantity and functionality of soil stocks from critical and pervasive threats in order to guarantee the availability, access, and utilization of soils to sustainably generate productive goods and ecosystem services. The dimensions proposed are availability, accessibility, utilization, and stability, which are obviously similar to the dimensions of food security. Availability refers to the quality and spatial distribution of soils of a given category. Accessibility relates to the conditions or mechanisms by which actors negotiate and gain entitlements to occupy and use a given soil. Utilization deals with the use or purpose to which a given soil is put and the capacity to manage and generate optimal private and public benefits from the soil. Finally, stability refers to the governance mechanisms that safeguard and improve the first three dimensions. These dimensions, their interactions, and how they can be operationalized in a strategy to secure soils are presented and discussed.
Highlights
Soil is probably the most important natural resource and biosystem that support human and terrestrial life
The objective of this paper is to contribute to the evolution of the discourse on soil security by proposing the use of the food security dimensions, which will be readily accessible to a wider range of stakeholders and ease conceptualization, monitoring, and assessment of soil security to inform policy and operational decisions
Because food and soil security share a conceptual space, and since food is already securitized, we argue that soil security can have dimensions similar to food security which is already popular amongst a wide range of actors and on the agendas of decision-makers and development practitioners
Summary
Soil is probably the most important natural resource and biosystem that support human and terrestrial life. It is a primary, finite natural resource from which other resources, goods, and services are derived. Soils play multiple ecosystem roles, including provisioning (food, fiber), regulating (water quality), supporting (biodiversity, nutrient cycling), and cultural (historical records) roles [1]. Soils are intricately linked with and play crucial roles in biogeochemical cycles. Almost all current global challenges such as food and water security, climate change, and biodiversity loss, among others, are directly or indirectly related to soils [2]. Soil is an inevitable resource for sustainable development and human security, and effort must be made to conserve global soil stocks
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