Simply fixing our degraded soil could have a huge climate impact

When it comes to food production, water supply and carbon capture, our best chance of fixing things may be to work on the soil beneath our feet

Andrew Sheng

Published: 8:15am, 12 Aug 2023

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As the summer sizzled, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned that “the era of global boiling has arrived”. What can we do about that?

Fighting climate change requires a systems change that will be tough – if not impossible. Pioneering systems thinker and co-author of the 1972 The Limits to Growth report, the late Dana Meadows, argued that a critical way to change complex systems is to find the right leverage point, where a small change can have a large impact. So what’s the obvious, common factor in climate boiling?

The scientific answer is carbon emissions. The atmosphere is mostly nitrogen and oxygen, but when sunlight hits more carbon particles in the atmosphere, Earth gets warmer. Before human life, there was a more balanced carbon cycle, with plants and microbiological life capturing carbon through photosynthesis, keeping the temperature balance.

As humans learned to till the soil and burn fossil fuels, we accelerated carbon emissions and climate warming, melting the ice caps and permafrost that trapped carbon dioxide and methane, causing sea levels to rise. This is threatening our food and water supply, biodiversity and will eventually threaten human existence. Food, water and energy shortages can trigger war and conflict, which only further damage the environment, like the Ukraine war has destroyed many of its farmlands.

So what is the leverage point when it comes to food production, water supply and carbon capture? The answer is: soil. Oceans are also important but the bulk of our population lives on land and relies on agriculture. Of the three biospheres – land, ocean and the atmosphere – soil arguably offers us the best chance to fix things.

Mismanagement has degraded more than a third of the world’s soil. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that soil degradation could rise to 90 per cent by 2050 if nothing is done. The more land degradation, the less food there is for our growing population.

07:58

Why is the Chinese government so concerned about food security?

Most rural communities grow their own food but urban societies, which make up more than half of mankind, rely on large-scale, industrial food production. A 2019 EAT-Lancet Commission report found the world’s faulty food systems had left about 1 billion people hungry and 2 billion people eating too much of the wrong food.

More than 40 per cent of adults (2.1 billion people) are now overweight, while 3.1 billion people cannot afford a healthy diet. Industrially produced food tends to include genetically modified organisms and lots of chemicals and preservatives that are neither healthy nor nutritious. Between 30 and 40 per cent of food in America is wasted during production and delivery, uneaten or thrown away due to poor logistics or overbuying.

Increasingly, industrial food production and agricultural land is concentrated in the hands of very large corporations. Their monoculture farming, such as for palm oil or soybean, may be efficient in the short run but ends up hurting biodiversity, increasing inequality by driving out small farmers, and can mean paying insufficient attention to carbon capture and environmental sustainability issues.

Deforestation exposes the top soil and allows it to be leached of nutrients. At the most basic level, soil comprises complex ecosystems of bacteria, fungi, worms and microbes that preserve biodiversity, conserve water and capture carbon. Saving the soil literally preserves our future.

01:46

Deforestation in Brazil’s Cerrado savannah hits seven-year high

Increasingly, there is awareness that a farmer-centric effort to regenerate soil and food production can not only tackle our food crisis and water shortages but also capture carbon. Europe has formed a coalition to explore a farm-centric agriculture regenerative initiative.

After the grain and fertiliser supply shocks arising from the Ukraine war, developing countries were further alarmed last month when India announced it would limit its rice exports. Suddenly, food self-sufficiency is high on the policy agenda – politicians are aware that high food prices are socially destabilising.

We should pay more policy attention to domestic farmers and the use of permaculture in regenerative farming to produce crop diversity and soil regeneration. Farming practices such as reforestation also capture carbon and can create new income sources from the selling of carbon credits. Unfortunately, the global carbon market is not yet functioning evenly, so developing countries are not benefiting fully from higher carbon prices.

02:32

Vietnam targets rice as an unlikely contributor to climate change

Recent archaeological finds in the Amazon showed the presence of terra preta, a nutrient-rich composted soil. Improving degraded land with compost could be a cheaper and more organic way of restoring soil quality and multi-crop farming. In short, technology is available to increase food production organically to help raise not just rural incomes but also food quality.

The regeneration of soil, forests and water sources are social impact projects, as important as public infrastructure such as roads and ports, offering high social benefit but low financial return. These are exactly the type of projects that social stock exchanges and charities should be supporting. Even in cities, vertical farming using organic compost and fertilisers can boost food self-sufficiency and cushion supply disruptions.

Is this all pie in the sky?

Solving climate change and social injustice is about doing more for many with less. Regenerating soil means improving a limited resource to produce more nutritious food for more people, reducing our need to compete with each other. Climate change is a change in context. Those who think systemically but act and adapt locally will survive. Those who deny change will not.

Andrew Sheng is a former central banker who writes on global issues from an Asian perspective