Save Soil Movement - A Race to Save the Planet

For all of Hollywood’s apocalyptic hyperbole, turns out reality is much more terrifying than celluloid doomsday fantasies. A silent catastrophe is unfolding across the globe: Soil extinction. The alarmingly rapid deterioration of cultivable soil could lead to massive species extinction, trigger global food and water shortage and set off unimaginable conflicts and suffering for humanity. This is not an ecological challenge but a very real existential threat to humanity. The Save Soil Movement is a global race against time to avert soil extinction.

Soil Extinction— the Invisible, Silent Catastrophe

The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), the global body working towards restoring and halting land degradation, estimates that by 2050, 90 per cent of the earth’s soil could become degraded. In other words, the planet will lose its ability to grow food; 95 per cent of our food comes from soil. For agricultural soil to yield nutritious crop, it has to contain a minimum of 3–6 per cent organic content. It is estimated that most agricultural soils in the world have a little more than 1 per cent organic content leading to severe depletion in the nutritional value of food around the world and accelerating malnutrition. Globally, 25 per cent of the earth’s fertile land has already turned to sand in which nothing can grow.

“It is a major issue that we are dependent on this thin layer that is sometimes just a couple of centimetres, sometimes several metres, but a very vulnerable, living skin,” says Prof. Nico Eisenhauer, of Leipzig University, one of the lead authors of a UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report on soil biodiversity.1 This “living skin” is what is keeping you and me and 87 per cent of life on the planet alive. By killing it, we are—quite literally—committing suicide and taking all life forms with us as we go down.