11-22 NOVEMBER 2024: The UN Climate Convention COP29 was held in Baku, Azerbaijan, themed In Solidarity for a Green World. The Coalition of Action 4 Soil Health (CA4SH) is a motivated, multi-stakeholder coalition working to strengthen, facilitate and accelerate the adoption and scaling of soil health restoration practices. Soil health drives productivity and economic growth, rural livelihoods, biodiversity protection, and mitigation and adaptation to the climate crisis.

At COP29, CA4SH convened members, partners, and other stakeholders to underscore the critical importance of including soil in the climate proceedings. CA4SH held and participated in several sessions that teased apart the intricacies of scaling global soil health on the ground through finance, policy, support for farmers and land managers, and more. Keeping soil health on the climate agenda is an overarching objective of CA4SH, and at COP29, the power of multistakeholder voices was heard. Read on for an overview of our engagement!

The Coalition of Action 4 Soil Health is rooted in the UN Convention to Combat Desertification because of the need for increased global soil health as a major tool to halt desertification, combat drought, and restore land.

The 2024 theme for Desertification and Drought Day (held annually on 17 June), is United for Land: Our Legacy. Our Future, so we asked members of CA4SH to share the relevance of soil health and fighting drought in the context of their organizations, and the role that multi-stakeholder partnerships play in achieving their goals.

Women and gender-diverse people around the World are a non-negotiable, indispensable part of food systems and efforts to scale soil health, globally.

For International Women’s Day 2024, we reached out to powerhouse women from across the CA4SH network who are working with NGOs, farmer cooperatives, research, public and private domains, and more, to deliver key messages on why gender inclusion is so important to scaling soil health.

Burning of unused crop residue is a common practice among farmers in India, contributing to carbon emissions and air pollution. BAIF and GIZ have partnered to establish a farmer producer organisation to convert this residue into biochar. Farmers sell their waste biomass to the FPO and purchase biochar to apply to their crop fields.