Healthy Soil for a Healthy Planet: Building Resilient Food Systems from the Ground Up

By Leigh Winowiecki, CA4SH co-lead and Soil and Land Health Leader, CIFOR-ICRAF and Martina Fleckenstein, Global Policy Lead, Food, WWF

Protecting and restoring nature is essential to tackling both the climate and food security crises. To most people, this means improving and increasing numbers and types of plants and animals, but a fundamental factor is often forgotten: our soil. The world is at a crossroads, with about one-third of the Earth’s surface degraded, negatively impacting 3.2 billion people. A fundamental change is required to help improve our soil and ecosystem health — and by doing so, we can start to build a nature-positive, food secure future with net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.