The Coalition of Action 4 Soil Health (CA4SH) is rooted in the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). Since our official launch in 2021, CA4SH has amassed a membership of over 200 multistakeholder organizations and collaborated with countless partners.

This year, the 16th Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UNCCD was focused on a people-centred approach to accelerating action on land and drought resilience, themed Our Land. Our Future.

Since healthy soil is essential to land and drought resilience, and provides co-benefits that link with all 17 of the Sustainable Development Goals, the CA4SH network came together for a record engagement at COP16 to advocate for scaling global soil health.

Countless CA4SH partners attended the UNFCCC COP29 this month, so we reached out to ask how it went!

Despite this being an incredibly busy time of year, we received several responses from partners who highlighted the highs, the lows, and what still needs to be done to embed soil health more deeply in agenda set forth at the Rio Conventions.

Here are their reflections, in their own words.

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!

23 October 2024: The Coalition of Action 4 Soil Health (CA4SH) co-hosted a virtual side event with CIFOR-ICRAF and the International Fertilizer Development Centre (IFDC) at the Norman A. Borlaug Dialogue of the World Food Prize (WFP). The event highlighted the critical importance of leveraging robust soil health monitoring methodologies to answer key knowledge gaps on the impact of land management and landscape restoration practices on soil health and to translate this information into policy.

Bringing together stakeholders representing the private sector, NGOs, academia, governments and more, CA4SH contributed to three events at the Africa Food Systems Forum (AGRF) between 4th and 5th September to discuss what scaling soil health looks like, and the vision for Africa’s soils we are working steadily towards.

10 MAY 2023: The Coalition of Action 4 Soil Health (CA4SH) hosted a Breakout Session at the AIM for Climate Summit in Washington, DC, USA. Global leaders from policy, industry, producer organisations, civil society groups, and scientists and researchers came together for the three-day Summit to drive their work on climate-smart agriculture and innovations in food systems.