Why soil needs governance

Why Soil Needs Governance

Soil is valuable — but also vulnerable

Soils form slowly, often over centuries or millennia, yet they can degrade within years or even months under unsustainable land use and poor management. The European Environment Agency (EEA) estimates that a significant proportion of European soils are in poor condition, with implications for food production, water regulation, climate mitigation, and biodiversity (EEA, 2023). At the global scale, the FAO and the Intergovernmental Technical Panel on Soils estimate that a substantial share of the world's soils are already degraded due to unsustainable land use, intensive agriculture, deforestation, urbanisation, and pollution (FAO & ITPS, 2015; FAO, 2021).

Because soil supports many ecosystem services, its degradation affects human well-being directly and indirectly. Soil degradation reduces agricultural productivity, increases flood risks, weakens climate regulation, and reduces resilience to climate extremes — highlighting the need for stronger soil governance and sustainable land management (Hannam, 2021).

Unlike air or water, soil degradation is often less visible — it happens gradually, beneath our feet. This relative invisibility has historically contributed to weaker and more fragmented protection frameworks compared to other environmental systems.

Soil as a common resource

In many regions, soils are privately owned or locally managed, yet the functions they perform have consequences that extend far beyond property boundaries. For example:

• Sealing soil in urban areas reduces infiltration, increasing surface runoff and flood risk downstream.
• Soil erosion can transport sediments, nutrients, and pollutants into rivers and lakes, affecting water quality far from the original site.
• Loss of soil organic carbon contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and affects global climate regulation.
• Degradation of peatlands releases stored carbon and alters regional hydrology.

These examples show that soil is both a locally managed resource and a shared environmental system whose impacts extend across landscapes and governance scales (Peake & Robb, 2022). Decisions about soil use are often made at the local scale, while their impacts may extend to regional, national, or global levels. Effective soil governance is therefore essential (Heuser, 2022).

Reflection — Soil Diary

Before exploring soil governance in more depth, complete the sentence below in your Soil Diary:

Protecting soil is challenging because…

You may think about: how slowly soils form compared to how quickly they can degrade; how soil use in one place can affect other regions; the fact that soils are often privately owned but have public importance; the difficulty of noticing soil degradation before it becomes serious.