Soil is a highly sophisticated living ecosystem and among humanity’s most precious non-renewable geo-resources. It supports agriculture which accounts for 95% of our food. It houses the rich biodiversity of the plant kingdom which does the work of converting carbon dioxide into life-sustaining oxygen. It absorbs, filters and regulates the flows of freshwater bodies. And it plays a vital role in climate change mitigation and adaptation by storing carbon (carbon sequestration) and decreasing greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere.
For millennia life on earth has been sustained by a thin layer of fertile soil on the earth’s crust.
But healthy soil is disappearing fast. Agriculture, deforestation and other factors have degraded and eroded topsoil at alarming rates. Globally, 52% of agricultural land is already degraded.
Much of what remains is stripped of organic matter resulting in dramatic declines in agricultural productivity of the soil. If this continues, the UN estimates that we could lose all cultivable soil in next 60 years. With a population expected to reach nearly 9.3 billion by 2045, we could soon face a food crisis of untold proportions.
Scientists say that we have around 45-50 harvests worth of soil left. That's just another 60 years! What happens thereafter? How will we survive with no soil to grow our food?
Unless we take collective action to regenerate soil today, the world will face its worst ever food crisis in next 50 years!
Thankfully, we are at a cusp where we can still turn this around. But Governments across the world must prioritize soil over everything else. And now. If we delay this any further it will take us 150-200 years to reverse soil degradation because that much damade would have been done by then.
So what can ordinary citizens like you and I do? Well, we neither have the luxury of time nor the option to look away. So, join in to #SaveSoil at http://savesoil.co/join
You owe it to the next generation.
