The challenge for the soil science community to contribute to the implementation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals
2019
BOUMA Johan | MONTANARELLA Luca | EVANYLO Greg
Seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted by 193 Governments at the General Assembly of the United Nations in 2015 to be achieved by 2030, present a roadmap to a sustainable future and a challenge to the science community. To guide activities and check progress, targets and indicators have been and are still being defined. The soil science community has published documents that clearly and convincingly demonstrate the primary importance of soil for SDGs addressing hunger, water quality, climate mitigation and biodiversity preservation and secondary relevance for several other SDGs. Soil scientists only marginally participated in the SDG discussions and are currently only peripherally engaged in discussions on targets or indicators. Agreement on several soil-related indicators has still not been achieved. Involvement of soil scientists in SDG-based studies is desirable to both develop solutions and to increase the visibility of the soils’ profession. Possible contributions of soil science to defining indicators for the SDGs are explored in this paper. We advocate for the pragmatic use of soil-water-atmosphere-plant simulation models and available soil surveys and soil databases where “representative” soil profiles for mapping units (genetically defined genoforms) are functionally expressed in terms of several phenoforms reflecting effects of different types of soil use and management that strongly affect functionality.
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