Soil security under climate change: safeguarding soil systems in a warming world

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Provides a comprehensive framework for integrating soil systems into climate change research.

🏢実務担当者:Offers a practical assessment tool (SSAF) for land managers and sustainability teams.

🏛政策担当者:Highlights the need to include soil security in climate adaptation and mitigation policies.

Although climate change is one of the major global challenges that influences diverse sectors and impacts environmental, economic, and societal discussions worldwide, its impacts on soil systems are often overlooked. Climate stressors are increasingly disrupting many soil properties and essential functions, thereby threatening the long-term sustainability of soil resources. The first section of this review synthesizes the existing literature on the negative impacts of climate change on key soil functions and highlights the limited recognition of soils in major global climate discussions, emphasizing the importance of an integrated and systematic approach to assessing soil systems. In response, the review proposes the soil security framework as a practical pathway to safeguarding soils under changing climatic conditions. Soil security offers a comprehensive approach to evaluating soil systems through five interconnected dimensions: capacity, condition, capital, connectivity, and codification. Securing soils requires going beyond chemical, physical, and biological assessments to incorporate social, economic, and policy dimensions, which raises awareness and strengthens policy responses to climate-related risks, as clearly outlined in the soil security framework. The review demonstrates how this framework can be applied to assess climate change impacts and direct soil protection strategies. In practice, this conceptual framework can be operationalised through the Soil Security Assessment Framework (SSAF), allowing its application under real-world conditions. The SSAF provides a practical pathway for translating the soil security concept into climate change assessment and management, further supported by the pedogenon, genosoil, and phenosoil concepts, which help distinguish the inherent soil capacity to buffer climate impacts from their current condition under increased climatic pressures. Overall, this review concludes that the soil security framework supports the protection of soil systems while providing a foundation for developing effective adaptation and mitigation strategies to enhance soil resilience and protect soil systems under a changing climate.

• openalex https://doi.org/10.3389/fclim.2026.1883998first seen 2026-08-13 04:57:32