Soil system science for sustainability and policy

Abstract

In general terms, policymaking is the process by which governments translate their political vision into programmes and actions to deliver outcomes that lead to desired changes in the real world. The UK Cabinet Office, in its Modernising Government White Paper (1999), identified several key features of good policymaking, which were that it should be evidence based, forward looking, outward looking, innovative, creative and flexible, inclusive, joined-up, learns lessons, and involve communication, evaluation and review. This special supplement to Soil Use and Management contains a collection of papers based upon a series of review projects commissioned in 2009–2010 by the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), principally to provide a key scientific evidence base to support strategic policy development in the context of ensuring the sustainability of soils, and which embody many of the other listed features. While the original projects were realized in what were the prevailing policy directives at the time1, the material from six projects has been updated and rewritten to provide a more general perspective on several key issues relating to the sustainable use and management of soils, viz. degradation threats, erosion, contamination by metals and metalloids, climate change impacts, technological opportunities to increase C storage in soils and the factors which underpin soil resilience. Although several of these papers use the UK context to provide detailed examples, essentially these issues are all relevant to soils in any circumstance across in the world, and the basic principles are applicable to other scenarios. And whereas policies inevitably change and develop, the need for sound scientific evidence to support them never diminishes. These papers review and explore such evidence and aim to identify key knowledge gaps that require attention. Copies of the original reports from which these papers are derived, plus several others in the series, are available at: http://randd.defra.gov.uk and searching for the Project Codes SP1601 and SP1605.