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Saving the ground beneath our feet: Establishing priorities and criteria for governing soil use and protection
The continual loss and impairment of soil ecosystem services (SES) across the globe calls for a fundamental reconsideration of soil governance mechanisms. This critical synthesis charts the history and evolution of national and international soil law and seeks to unravel certain challenges that have...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
The Royal Society
2021
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8613628/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34853698 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.201994 |
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author | Peake, Lewis Robb, Cairo |
author_facet | Peake, Lewis Robb, Cairo |
author_sort | Peake, Lewis |
collection | PubMed |
description | The continual loss and impairment of soil ecosystem services (SES) across the globe calls for a fundamental reconsideration of soil governance mechanisms. This critical synthesis charts the history and evolution of national and international soil law and seeks to unravel certain challenges that have contributed to this failure in governance. It describes and categorizes law and policy responses to different soil threats, and identifies a worrying widespread absence of legislation for oversight and protection of agricultural soils from urbanization, as well as a lack of clear legal mechanisms to determine national priorities for soil protection. A reduction in the world's prime farmland threatens SES, including food security, carbon storage and biodiversity. Falling between the stalls of agricultural and environmental law, the fate of farmland is often left to planners who do not see themselves as responsible for soils. Consequently, legal instruments with the greatest power to affect soil, sometimes irreversibly, are often framed and worded with little or no reference to the soil. Nevertheless, emerging conceptual frameworks might offer positive outcomes. The authors advocate robust holistic policies of soil governance and land use planning that place SES and natural capital at the heart of decision making. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-8613628 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2021 |
publisher | The Royal Society |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-86136282021-11-30 Saving the ground beneath our feet: Establishing priorities and criteria for governing soil use and protection Peake, Lewis Robb, Cairo R Soc Open Sci Ecology, Conservation and Global Change Biology The continual loss and impairment of soil ecosystem services (SES) across the globe calls for a fundamental reconsideration of soil governance mechanisms. This critical synthesis charts the history and evolution of national and international soil law and seeks to unravel certain challenges that have contributed to this failure in governance. It describes and categorizes law and policy responses to different soil threats, and identifies a worrying widespread absence of legislation for oversight and protection of agricultural soils from urbanization, as well as a lack of clear legal mechanisms to determine national priorities for soil protection. A reduction in the world's prime farmland threatens SES, including food security, carbon storage and biodiversity. Falling between the stalls of agricultural and environmental law, the fate of farmland is often left to planners who do not see themselves as responsible for soils. Consequently, legal instruments with the greatest power to affect soil, sometimes irreversibly, are often framed and worded with little or no reference to the soil. Nevertheless, emerging conceptual frameworks might offer positive outcomes. The authors advocate robust holistic policies of soil governance and land use planning that place SES and natural capital at the heart of decision making. The Royal Society 2021-11-24 /pmc/articles/PMC8613628/ /pubmed/34853698 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.201994 Text en © 2021 The Authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Ecology, Conservation and Global Change Biology Peake, Lewis Robb, Cairo Saving the ground beneath our feet: Establishing priorities and criteria for governing soil use and protection |
title | Saving the ground beneath our feet: Establishing priorities and criteria for governing soil use and protection |
title_full | Saving the ground beneath our feet: Establishing priorities and criteria for governing soil use and protection |
title_fullStr | Saving the ground beneath our feet: Establishing priorities and criteria for governing soil use and protection |
title_full_unstemmed | Saving the ground beneath our feet: Establishing priorities and criteria for governing soil use and protection |
title_short | Saving the ground beneath our feet: Establishing priorities and criteria for governing soil use and protection |
title_sort | saving the ground beneath our feet: establishing priorities and criteria for governing soil use and protection |
topic | Ecology, Conservation and Global Change Biology |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8613628/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34853698 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsos.201994 |
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