Workshop – Soil Functions and Ecosystem Services in the Sustainable Development. Goals: supporting the sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems and the fight against poverty, hunger and climate change

Healthy soil is essential to ensure sustainable development, to support ecosystem services, biodiversity conservation, and climate change adaptation and mitigation. Even though they play these important roles, soils around the world are suffering a continuous decline in quality and are being taken over by urban sprawl. These trends lead to issues of food insecurity, contamination of water resources, desertification, and increased vulnerability to extreme climatic events.

The year 2015 has been declared as the International Year of Soils which provides an important momentum to discuss the role of soils for sustainable development. This role has been recognized in the proposed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as per the outcome document of the Open Working Group created to advance the process to develop the SDGs and which was published on 19 July 2014. The 17 potential SDGs and accompanying targets cover areas such as poverty, food, equality, water, energy, and climate change. Soils are addressed directly for instance in a target under goal 2 on food security and sustainable agriculture, where the need to progressively improve land and soil quality for sustainable food production systems is highlighted. A target under goal 15 on terrestrial ecosystems addresses the need to combat desertification, restore degraded land and soil and strive to achieve a land-degradation neutral world. At the same time, ecosystem services provided by soils will be needed to achieve several of the targets across the different goals, for example on the conservation of forests, climate change mitigation, and ensuring access to productive land, etc.

The final set of SDGs is expected to be adopted in the fall of 2015 at the United Nations General Assembly. It is crucial to ensure that the SDGs are developed in a way that empowers and supports countries to address the issue of soil and land degradation for sustainable development.

The IASS has been working, together with partners, since the first Global Soil Week in 2012 to put soils and land on the SDG agenda. This event will aim to continue this process and to invite further stakeholders to collaborate by engaging in a dynamic discussion to address the role of soils and land in the SDGs and making recommendations on the way forward towards the final set of SDGs. The discussions will also contribute to the joint development of a workshop at the Global Soil Week in April 2015 in Berlin.