Opinion | 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
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.
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.