Building Climate Resilience with Healthy Soils!
Climate change is increasing the intensity of floods, droughts, and extreme weather, threatening global agriculture and food security. Yet, healthy soils offer a powerful solution. Acting as natural carbon sinks, they store carbon through plant and microbial processes while improving water retention, nutrient cycling, and biodiversity. By investing in healthy soils, agriculture can shift from vulnerability to resilience, playing a vital role in climate change mitigation and adaptation.
Climate change impacts
Over the last century, the intensity of natural hazards such as drought, flood and cyclones has increased throughout the last century. Additionally, climate change has led to an increase in the frequency of the hazard events related to the increase in temperatures due to GHG emissions, and an increase in the frequency and intensity of precipitation events. This increase in natural hazards can be attributed to factors such as
- Climate change
- Human activities
- Gowing population
- Ecosystem degradation
Role of agriculture in climate resilience
Agriculture is one of the major land uses globally, as it is crucial for sustaining the global rise in food demand. Agriculture is affected by climate impacts, such as floods, droughts, and rising temperatures. For Instance, the EU currently loses around 28 billion Euros on crop and livestock yields every year (European Bank, 2025). However, agricultural systems globally can also act as a powerhouse to mitigate the global climate change impacts, through sustainable farming systems, as they act as carbon storage systems and provide environmental services, such as (Baer and Birge, 2018)
- Water retention
- Water quality
- Nutrient cycling
- Enhance biodiversity
Although agricultural systems provide environmental services crucial to climate change mitigation, they may require exceptional care in management practices, as it is also at the expense of the intense climate impacts.
Carbon sequestration
While degraded soils lead to carbon emissions from the soils, healthy soils store carbon within the soils. The plants uptake carbon dioxide through photosynthesis, and this carbon is then stored in soil through microbial decomposition (Kallenbach et al., 2016). Additionally, plant roots exudate carbon into the soil (Lei et al., 2023). Overall, cropping systems aid in carbon storage through
- Photosynthesis
- Microbial decomposition
- Root exudates
Management practices for carbon sequestration
According to (Hatano et al., 2024) soil management practices are crucial to ensure the storage of the carbon, as improper soil management practices limit the potential of the soil to retain organic carbon. The effective methods are
- Mulching
- No tillage
- Cover Crops
- Planting trees
However, management strategies should be carefully tailored to specific crop types, local environmental conditions, and soil characteristics.
Resilience to floods and droughts
Soils and their associated ecosystems can aid in the regulation of floods, as the vegetation cover can increase infiltration within the soil and reduce and delay surface run-off. Additionally, tree canopies lead to slow precipitation release, which leads to increased infiltration of water into the soil and storage within subsurface layers. For Droughts, the implementation of cover crops and mulching reduces soil evaporation and increases soil water storage by 10%. Additionally, the physical properties of soil influence the capacity of the soil to store water (Broenick and Lal, 2005; Brady and Weil, 2016).
- Better aggregation, i.e., increased soil pores
- Higher organic matter
Crop tolerance to floods and droughts through healthy soils
Healthy soils provide crops with tolerance to floods and droughts and enhance crop resilience to climate change impacts. (Neher et al., 2022) have mentioned the importance of healthy soils, as healthy soils that hold microbiome help plants tolerate flooding or drought by
- Altering the water use efficiency of the plant
- Altering the photosynthetic rate of the plant
- Improving access to nutrients
- Protecting against disease
Additionally, Tahat et al. (2020) have discussed that plant root-associated biota in the soil influence how plant species respond to drought and flood and enhance plant adaptation to climate change impacts.
Role of betterSoil with healthy soils
Overall, healthy soils are crucial to both climate change impact mitigation and adaptation, along with providing tolerance to existing crops to climate change. Soil is a system crucial to carbon sequestration and adaptation of cropping systems, floods, and droughts. BetterSoil provides services to enhance soil health by ensuring science is applied in practice and aids in bringing soil solutions to farmers, farm owners, and food businesses through partnerships with every stakeholder involved in the food supply chain. To know more, please stay in touch and take a look at our services on the website!
References:
Baer, S.G. and Birgé, H.E., 2018. Soil ecosystem services: an overview (pp. 17-38).
Brady, N.C., 1984. The nature and properties of soils.
Bronick, C.J. and Lal, R., 2005. Soil structure and management: a review. Geoderma, 124(1-2), pp.3-22.
European Investment Bank. (2025). Insurance and Risk Management Tools for Agriculture in the EU. fi‑compass – Advisory on financial instruments under EU shared management. Available at: https://www.fi‑compass.eu/library/market‑analysis/insurance‑and‑risk‑management‑tools‑agriculture‑eu
Hatano, R., Mukumbuta, I. and Shimizu, M., 2024. Soil health intensification through strengthening soil structure improves soil carbon sequestration. Agriculture, 14(8), p.1290.
Kallenbach, C.M., Frey, S.D. and Grandy, A.S., 2016. Direct evidence for microbial-derived soil organic matter formation and its ecophysiological controls. Nature communications, 7(1), p.13630.
Lei, X., Shen, Y., Zhao, J., Huang, J., Wang, H., Yu, Y. and Xiao, C., 2023. Root exudates mediate the processes of soil organic carbon input and efflux. Plants, 12(3), p.630.
M. Tahat, M., M. Alananbeh, K., A. Othman, Y., and I. Leskovar, D., 2020. Soil health and sustainable agriculture. Sustainability, 12(12), p.4859.
Neher, D.A., Harris, J.M., Horner, C.E., Scarborough, M.J., Badireddy, A.R., Faulkner, J.W., White, A.C., Darby, H.M., Farley, J.C. and Bishop-von Wettberg, E.J., 2022. Resilient soils for resilient farms: An integrative approach to assess, promote, and value soil health for small-and medium-size farms. Phytobiomes Journal, 6(3), pp.201-206.