Improving soil and water conservation and ecosystem services by sustainable soil management practices: From a global to an Italian soil partnership

The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) identify the need to restore degraded soils in order to improve productivity and the provision of ecosystem services. The aim is to support food production, store and supply clean water, conserve biodiversity, sequester carbon, and improve soil resilience in a context of climate change. Within this framework, in order to achieve the SDGs and to correct land management in the long-term, soil management is considered mandatory. The reduction of land degradation should be based on various sustainable soil management practices that improve and maintain soil organic matter levels, increase water infiltration, and improve soil water management. This technical review a policy paper summarizes the sustainable and territorial impact of soil degradation, including soil water erosion, from the global level to the European and National levels. Furthermore, with the aim of sharing ongoing soil and water management actions, instruments, and initiatives, we provide information on soil and water conservation activities and prospects in Italy. Introduction With the World’s population expected to reach ≈10 billion by 2050 (UN, 2019), and considering that ≈99 % of the calories needed by humankind comes from the land, more sustainable ways to produce food are required (UN, 2019). Preserving the world foodsupply depends both on the productivity and quality of agricultural soils, which could produce up to 58% more food than nowadays (FAO, 2015, 2019a; UN, 2019). The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) identify the need to restore degraded soils to improve productivity. To achieve this goal, proper longterm land management is considered mandatory (Keesstra et al., 2016). There is a wide consensus on the need to enhance soil resources to support food production, store and provide clean water, conserve biodiversity, sequester carbon, and improve resilience in a context of climate change (Keesstra et al., 2016). These objectives serve to implement sustainable soil management practices worldwide. Nevertheless, recent FAO data on the Status of the World Soil Resource (2015) indicate that about 33% of the World’s soils are moderately or severely degraded due to unsustainable management practices and other chemical and physical issues mainly related to soil erosion, salinization, compaction, acidification, and chemical pollution. Sustainable soil management (SSM) has been shown to contribute to increase agri-food production, improving the nutritional quality of food and enabling soils to gradually mitigate and adapt to climate change. In particular, ‘diverse farming approaches aim to promote the sustainable management of soils with the goal of improving productivity, as well as agroecology, conservation agriculture, agroforestry’ (FAO, 2015). The adoption of SSM practices is a valuable tool for adapting to climate change and for embarking on a process of safeguarding key ecosystem services and biodiversity (Garbach et al., 2017; Altobelli and Del Giudice, 2017).