More attention to the health and management of the planet's soils will be needed to meet the challenge of feeding a growing world population while coping with climate change and increased scarcity of natural resources, FAO Deputy Director-General Maria Helena Semedo told a group of leading soil scientists and research organizations gathered at the UN agency's Rome headquarters on Friday.

The deputy director's remarks were made at an event marking World Soil Day. Semedo said, "The importance of soil for food security should be obvious. From the origins of civilization in early farming communities up through today, we can see how societies have prospered thanks to healthy soils and declined when their lands became degraded or infertile."

Healthy soil is not only the foundation of food production, but serves other functions, she noted; soil is critical to the health of ground and surface waters and ecosystem health, and sequesters twice as much carbon as is found in the atmosphere.

However, she added, "until recently, soils were the most overlooked and widely degraded natural resource."

This situation has now begun to change, though the UN still does not officially recognise World Soil Day, Semedo said the UN is "poised" to endorse the day of awareness and has launched an international Global Soil Partnership.

A critical resource, under pressure

Around the world, soil is under pressure: FAO studies have found that one quarter of the Earth's land areas are highly degraded due to a variety of human activities - including farming. In Europe, research published in September by the EU Commission's in-house scientific advisory service, the Joint Research Centre, revealed that soil biodiversity is under threat in 56 percent of EU territory. The JRC report held up "intense land exploitation" as the main pressure on soil biodiversity" and added that states – including the UK – that have opposed measures to protect soils on an EU levels tend to be the worst affected by degradation.  

Currently some 1.6 billion hectares of land are used to grow crops around the world, and in many instances these areas have become degraded through bad practices that result in water and wind erosion, the loss of organic matter, topsoil compaction, salinization and other forms of pollution, and nutrient loss.

A long-needed data update

Central to discussions at the FAO headquarters in Rome was the need to update global data-bases related to soil health condition. A joint FAO world survey of the state of soils assembled during the late 1970s and early 1980s is still the only globe-spanning data reference on soils. On Friday, FAO said its recently established Global Soil Partnership (GSP) is now working to establish a new global soil information system, which will begin functioning by 2014 and is expected to be fully operational within four years.

Wouter Verhey, Policy Coordinator, Ministry of Economic Affairs of The Netherlands, presented SoilGrids1km, a new system for producing updatable soil property and class maps for the entire world, developed by the International Soil Reference and Information Centre (ISRIC) at Wageningen University. The system used to produce SoilGrids1km constitutes a contribution to the GSP's global soil information system effort.

More attention to contamination

Also during the event at FAO, the Geological Surveys of Europe (EuroGeoSurveys, EGS) launched a new database providing previously unavailable information on the chemical composition and quality of soils in 33 European countries, including the presence of naturally occurring as well as man-made pollutants.

Up till now, most soil mapping projects have focused on fertility. EGS's Geochemical Mapping of Agricultural and Grazing Land Soil (GEMAS) project is unique in its focus on quality and contamination. This is new territory for soils science and one which will figure prominently in the work of FAO's Global Soil Partnership.

Making a keynote speech on the subject, Luca Montanarella, Chair of the GSP's Intergovernmental Technical Panel on Soils, said, "More data are needed in order to make a full scientific assessment of diffuse soil contamination and its potential links with food quality. The newly established Intergovernmental Technical Panel on Soil (ITPS) provides the necessary independent scientific advice in order to support policy decisions in relation to soil quality and food safety. Healthy soil provides healthy food."

New soil portal

FAO also launched a new online "soil portal," which offers a comprehensive collection of soil maps and over 700 technical reports.